Persephone Book No 115 is the real-life
diary of Parisian Jewish journalist Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar written during the
final weeks of World War Two while her husband André was imprisoned by the
Nazis.
Betraying her experiences as a writer,
Maman, What Are We Called Now? is a beautifully constructed series of
heartbreakingly sad snapshots into the terrifying, traumatic and chaotic
existence for those left behind by the war, desperate for news of their stolen
loved ones.
The book’s title comes from a question one
of Jacqueline’s confused children, Sylvio, asks her not only what they are now
called (as in, are they Jewish, are they French, what are they?) but also how
old she is – the wartime experiences having snatched away all of her childhood
innocence and simplicity. At the time, Sylvio was just 10 and unaware that
asking such a question risked their dangerous situation being found out – they
were living under assumed names and with false identities.
In the lengthy diary entry of August 6,
when it is announced the Americans have arrived in Paris, Jacqueline’s initial
optimism that war is ending is perilously balanced with her fears for André’s
safety. The diary entry is so beautifully written and spells out Jacqueline’s
steadfast loyalty to her Jewish heritage, along with her sadness that she has
no fixed home anymore. The prose brings to mind sociologist Zymunt Bauman’s iconic
book Modernity And The Holocaust.
Jacqueline writes: “Being Jewish has become
even more of an obsession than being French, an obsession which, like a hidden
wound, has worked its way slowly and insidiously under our skin and right into
our souls. Little by little it has made us into ‘foreigners’ in our own country,
French but ‘different’ … It has turned us into outsiders.”
This echoes Bauman’s theory of
understanding the stranger. First you try to make the stranger one of you, then
you keep the stranger at a distance, and then you try to get rid of the
stranger altogether. For Bauman the Jew is the archetypal stranger in society. Many
Jews tried to assimilate into German society having emerged from the
ghettos. They started wearing the same clothes as Germans, adopting the same
religion, living in the same areas. But these attempts to assimilate
the German way of life led to hostility. It stoked fears of the outsider coming inside.
The haunting internal questioning that
Jacqueline goes through as she tries to make sense of what it means to be
Jewish in this new world is particularly heartrending. Not least because she
identifies more as French than as Jewish, and the Jewish identity has been
thrust upon her by the Nazis as a reason to exterminate people.