Crossing Boundaries
A text published in the journal esquisse(s), no. 4, spring 2013 (Traverses).
This English version is an automated translation of Izio Rosenman’s French original; the French text is authoritative.
An interest in politics has always been part of me.
After I arrived in France, at ten years old in 1945, coming from the camp, I was placed in a children’s home. As soon as I had mastered the French language well enough, all my weekly pocket money went on buying a few copies of a daily newspaper. I believe I have always been an activist, yet I never joined a party. No doubt this trait comes from far back. Perhaps I inherited it — along with this way of always straddling two fields, of living in two worlds, of being in the in-between.
For I was born, in 1935, in a Poland then modernizing, in a Jewish community of three million undergoing deep change, moving from an Orthodox religious Jewish civilization — that of the Shtetl in particular — to an urban civilization, more secular and so freer, with numerous political movements: religious, Zionist, Bundist, communist. Just before the Second World War, more than 350,000 Jews lived in Warsaw, nearly a third of the population: a very diverse population, with its cultures, its schools, its institutions, its parties.
A transformation of culture, of mentalities, of education, of the status of women was under way. There was a kind of coexistence — or rather of permanent confrontation — between the old and the new. Between the Hasidism of the Baal Shem Tov1 and Marx or Borochov.
As in what Kafka writes, in a letter to Max Brod, about Jewish intellectuals abandoning the Yiddish language for German:
What most of those who began to write in German wanted was to leave Judaism behind, generally with the vague approval of their fathers (it was this vagueness that was outrageous); they wanted it, but their hind legs still stuck to the father’s Judaism and their front legs found no new ground. The despair that followed was their inspiration.
My family’s history is a good illustration of this period of transition, of this doubling and these forkings. My parents spoke Yiddish to each other, but with us, their three children, they spoke Polish, so that we would become good Polish citizens. I have a vague memory of potato fritters — the Hanukkah latkes — coexisting with the Christmas tree. My maternal grandfather was a very pious Jew who had spent many years in a yeshiva, yet all his children had become communists, sympathizers or activists — one, an orthodox communist and “professional” militant, spent ten years in the Stalinist camps and came out still a communist; the second, a Trotskyist, left for the USSR and vanished without trace; the others were simply sympathizers. But they came on the holy days, at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to sing the prayers with their father, who had a very beautiful voice. An anecdote about one of my uncles truly shows this dual identity in transition: at sixteen or seventeen, he went to prayer very early in the morning, around five o’clock, at the first minyan, because at six there was the meeting of the communist cell in the forest. Is it from these figures that I inherited at once the interest in politics, the need for commitment, and the desire for a kind of dual identity?
I have often wondered about the meaning of this permanent doubling. I have never been able to be content with settling where I found myself, in professional life as in culture. I plunged into the study of traditional religious Jewish texts, while at the same time I was on the left and tempted by Marxism. A little later, freshly out of a scientific grande école, and having barely begun research work in physics toward a thesis, I threw myself into a degree in sociology and ethnology. I could never remain exactly where I was, always tempted by the exploration of an intellectual elsewhere.
To be a physics researcher entails, by definition, being in wait to discover something new, and so walking toward a terra incognita — the essential motivation of a researcher. But what is the meaning of this research activity? It is a question we asked ourselves for a year or two, with a few fellow physicists, all of us in analysis: we wondered what the researcher’s craft and the activity of research represented for us in analytical terms. A theoretical activity that would be the continuation of those childhood games (asking “where do children come from?”), or a practical activity extending that of children who love to take clocks and Lego apart and put them back together.
The search for the elsewhere, the discovery of the unknown, the hidden, the other, in the ethnologist’s work, is perhaps not so different from this questioning. It is perhaps why I chose to learn, at Langues O’, a very distant language, of the extreme elsewhere: Burmese, studied for two years. We were only four students (another minority vocation?). All this while continuing my thesis in physics. Always to be elsewhere than where I am. I have always thought I made a natural transition when I moved from questioning the other to questioning myself, in beginning a psychoanalysis that lasted a long time. Having taken a degree and then a DESS in clinical psychology, I was able to work in a hospital setting and in a CMPP2. Having become a psychoanalyst, I continued my double life: physicist by day, psychoanalyst by evening. A temporal doubling. In which of the activities was I myself? I could not really say. It is a little like the dream and waking life, which both belong to us; or again this double polarity that inhabits us: the rational part and the poetic or imaginary part. Which is truer?
Was it a kind of bulimia that drove me to want to embrace everything, without ever letting go of anything? To leave nothing, to stay attached. Perhaps to remain a child. All these experiences I did not really carry through to the end, never completely leaving any place — geographical, intellectual or identitary. I took side-paths but never made a break. As in emotional life, where I have stayed friends with the women to whom I was bound at one moment or another of life.
This continuity-discontinuity still shows itself today. Thus the traditional Jewish culture that remained with me from the time of my adolescence and youth often returns in other fields: I often find myself quoting a biblical or Talmudic passage in an unexpected context. I strive to find a secular or mythical meaning in the traditional Jewish texts, trying to formulate the Jewish identity to which I am strongly attached — I who am an atheist — in terms of cultural identity and not of religious identity. This is what I call “Judaism as culture.” A way of integrating the past and the present, however different they may be. For years I have pursued this attempt in a strong associative commitment, which represents for me the desire to realize my Jewish identity in the present world, outside the Jewish religious ghetto.
All the groups to which I have belonged or belong have always been minorities. I find there another tendency familiar to me: being in the minority. Another minority commitment. For decades I have campaigned for Israeli-Palestinian peace, for Judeo-Arab dialogue, at La Paix Maintenant and in JCall — the European Jewish association for Israel and for peace with the Palestinians, founded on the principle of “two peoples, two states.” Against all the fronts of refusal. Despite the failures, the disappointments and the disenchantments. It is as if one endlessly took up again a pilgrim’s staff, driven by an irrepressible need, by a hope, by a desire to improve, to repair the world — the Tikkun Olam of Jewish mystical tradition. To try to build bridges between places, fields, entities that seem heterogeneous. To bring into dialogue people who ignore one another.
So, is it a dream of omnipotence, according to which an active minority could on its own change a situation? Is it the dream of a mastery of knowledge in an infinite pursuit? To link the disciplines, the languages, the closed identities. An unfindable dream of the unification of the human being between the hard sciences and humanist culture; a unity to be found between Jewish identity and citizen identity, all within a fragmented universe of multiple knowledges and belongings. It is the same dream, or desire, to reunify the past and the present. Perhaps that is the key to a cultural identity: to take on the past — different from what one is — yet to claim it all the same as our own.
Did I cover the domain that seemed assigned to me, or did I, like a dilettante wanderer, jump the fences that separate the fields, long enough to taste the other fruits of the many trees of knowledge? While following a great road, I have loved to take side-paths.