Self-Hate

From a book review of Caleur du Sang, written in occupied France by Irene Nemirovsky who later perished in Auschwitz and only recently discovered:-

As in “Suite Française,” the fate of Jews in occupied France is not an issue in “Chaleur du Sang.” Rather, it is with the reissue — and new translations — of “David Golder,” Némirovsky’s first novel, that her attitude toward Jews has become the focus of heated debate.

Critics have noted that “David Golder” portrays a wealthy and embittered Jewish immigrant to Paris, that in the 1930s Némirovsky wrote short stories for some right-wing journals and that in 1940 she and her family converted to Catholicism (although this did not save her or her husband).

“Her supposed ‘self-hating’ has been more of an issue in the Anglo-Saxon world and Israel than here,” said Olivier Rubinstein, president of Éditions Denoël. “When Denise and I went to Israel for the publication of ‘Suite Française’ in Hebrew, there were virulent debates about her supposed anti-Semitism.

“I am not trying to hide aspects that are disagreeable,” he went on, “but I think the question is more complex. I think it was less anti-Semitism than the disdain that bourgeois Jews like Némirovsky had for immigrant shtetl Jews from Poland and Russia. And remember, we’re judging actions of 1938 with the post-Holocaust eyes of 2007.”

So, this topic (which I just recently touched on) of Jews managing to be our own worse enemies takes on forms that always seem to never benefit the despiser, the disliker and deprecator. But they never learn. Whether on the basis of differences of orign, of custom, of ideology and politics, thsi anathema of being identified too much as the Jew, as the nationalist, as the religious, it will always come back as a boomerang, to no one's advantage.