A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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СКАЧАТЬ a sign both of openness and of modernity, if only by virtue of the form he adopted to transmit to others the history of a people without land at that time, a history that was also his own. His history writing developed in concentric circles, growing ever larger: from the fragile self, liable to disappear at any moment because of an incurable illness; to his family; his cultural group; his professional group, the Alliance, whose history he wrote in part; and finally, to the ethnic or denominational group to which he belonged, the Jewish people, whose history he also retraced. These circles interpenetrate at different moments of his own history and are an integral part of the protagonist. The same self expresses itself through these detours, which all come together to form a totality. Of course, Arié was backed into writing the history of the Alliance, acting as ghostwriter for the president of the organization, a man he admired so much that he named his younger son, Narcisse, after him. This undertaking once more reflects Arié’s dependence on the Alliance, a financial and moral dependence, where the very selfhood of the author was effaced behind an institution and an ideology. (That ideology influenced him so much that, by his own free will, he was led to denigrate a large part of his own Sephardi culture.) We know that the name “Arié” does not figure on the book’s cover, which bore the signature of Narcisse Leven. Later, in contrast, the book on the history of the Jewish people was written on his own initiative. He drafted it at the beginning of World War I, after the Balkan Wars, at a time when everything was beginning to collapse in Europe. It was when humanity, and therefore his own people, were in danger that Arié felt the need to consign his people’s history to paper. Disappearance and death always occupied a central place in his existence, and it was by writing his own history, and history in general, that he brought them under control, transforming them into “memory,” into a kind of symbolic immortality.

      At the same time, the move from autobiography to the journal constitutes the move from the definitive to the provisional. Until that time, the author had reported a past that he controlled and looked upon with the distance implied in the notion of retrospection, though he made the leap into the present at the end, preparing the way for the journal. This immediate present links the journal, recounted at a year’s distance (a distance that, conversely, introduces distanciation and longer-term perspective), to the autobiography that precedes it. It is on this level that the interrelation between the two genres intervenes. We are now in the register of a present time relegated to the past—a kind of hoarding of time, hence of life, because the future is unforeseeable. We might even wonder whether Gabriel succeeded in living in the present, given the place occupied in his everyday life by his illness and its inexorable ritual. The year was quantified according to the number of times he spit blood, the days of fever, and the days spent in bed. A drop in that number was transformed into a sign of improvement, hence a triumph over the illness. The rhythm followed was that of the illness; that triumph was tangible only in the overall accounting of the year, since another year of life amounted to postponing death for a year. It was not the day that marked the journal but the year, and especially the year gone by, since the past was reassuring to the gravely ill Arié. The journal thus became a chronicle of the past year; the day would have been a present too close to the future, a future Arié could not even imagine. He begins his journal this way: “In a first notebook, I noted the important events in my life until 1906. I now propose to continue the account and to note each year, as long as Providence will allow me, the important facts concerning my family and myself.”

      Why did Gabriel Arié keep a journal? We are no longer dealing with the issue of exemplarity, the moral scope of autobiography, a monument erected to his glory and given as an offering to his descendants. “Prisoner of his illness and traveler into his own abyss, the ill man will have a tendency to keep a journal, which sometimes helps him get well and, in any case, can have medical value.”⁵⁰ Arié’s journal, begun when he was extremely sick in Davos, was continued until the author’s death in 1939. Did he write it for himself? We know that the journal both is and is not addressed to the Other.⁵¹ It would be very risky to question the sincerity of this journal. Why must a journal be sincere, even when, fundamentally, its author aspires toward sincerity? In what way is sincerity an asset in this kind of writing? We might presume that everything can be said in a journal, but we know that, in fact, all kinds of prohibitions and taboos intervene and form obstacles.

      Arié’s journal is permeated by the theme of illness, which, once the illness stabilizes, is transformed into the theme of professional success and money. Illness and money are often linked and interchangeable. Illness is a factor that takes away one’s security, while the lack of money does the same. Throughout the pages of this journal the fear of being without money and the satisfaction of possessing it recur; the benefits money procures are given less importance than the security it provides. We know that money problems generally have an important place in journals.⁵² Year after year, Arié tallies up the money amassed and looks with satisfaction on the distance traveled. From being a mere teacher, obliged to take odd jobs to make ends meet, then an invalid supported by his brother or living on the pension granted by the Alliance, he slowly made his way later on. Between 1885 and 1887, he tried his luck at business, resigning for the first time from the Alliance, his protective mother. He returned to the fold after his failure. It was only after he left Davos that he began to make a name for himself in insurance and banking. By the 1920s he was a rich man, free from want. Even though he never tallied up his fortune, he noted that he was wealthy. In any case, his many trips abroad and his photographs attest to his bourgeois way of life. His relative recovery also delivered him from his lack of self-confidence. For him, becoming an instructor in the Alliance schools had represented the beginning of financial security, as opposed to what he had known at his parents’ home, since his father’s economic situation had always been mediocre. For a long time, he lived haunted by the idea that what had happened to his father—a series of humiliations endured from his employers, his mother’s brothers—would be replicated in his own life. His first business failure confirmed him in his fears. The departure from Davos in 1913 was thus accompanied by a new social and economic departure. The parenthesis had lasted eight years.

      Family also occupies a preponderant place, but it is not always spared, which is common in journals in general.⁵³ Individualism is subordinated to family life, a trait of bourgeois civilization.⁵⁴ The Other occupies an important place and situates the author in relation to those who surround him, even though the primary protagonist remains the omnipresent self. The author also dwells on misfortunes and good fortune, more on the first than on the second; there is nothing astonishing in this either. And although in the journal it is common to record everything relating to one’s love life,⁵⁵ Gabriel Arié does so with a great deal of circumspection, thus conforming to local mores, which obliged him to say little and to resort to subterfuges when doing so. We nevertheless find, next to certain explicit confessions, others that are barely outlined but easily discernible.

      “The journal allows for a certain leveling of events. A war or revolution often holds no more place than a headache or the purchase of a pair of shoes.”⁵⁶ Arié does not completely escape that constant, even though he remains relatively sensitive to what is going on around him in society. In fact, it was as much to complete the public aspect of the individual, of this self with which one becomes familiar throughout the text, as to situate him in the social and political context of his age that we added a selection of letters written to the Alliance. We have thus been led to mark the text and establish the exchange between the private and the public man, even while respecting the text’s original continuity and linearity. Of course, the letters are administrative in nature, of a kind one finds by the thousand in the Alliance archives. The Alliance teachers had a style particular to them, which corresponded above all to the imperatives of the leadership, who were very keen on spelling and syntax. In addition, there was the ideological mold into which instructors poured everything, so as not to cross the leadership and thus bring trouble upon themselves. Gabriel Arié was no exception, but for most of his life he had the privilege of addressing the leadership as an equal. It is through this relationship that we discover certain of the traits of the man Arié, who adopted a way of expressing himself proper to himself even though he shared the ideas in force within the organization. Arié expected nothing from the Alliance except a certain respectability, which he no longer needed СКАЧАТЬ