But again misfortune knocked on the writer’s door. At the time when this success was being established, on May 4, 2019 he lost his wife Jacqueline to lung cancer. What can a writer do then but write a book of mourning and it was the magnificent and moving “Jacqueline, Jacqueline” in 2021.
The cry of love by Jean-Claude Grumberg
Here he is back with the portrait of his mother Suzanne which he blamed himself for not having mentioned yet even though he had spoken of his father on several occasions. The book is the story of a Jewish family from Eastern Europe who had to flee pogroms and then survive the Holocaust. But as Jean-Claude Grumberg only knows fragments of the story of this adored Maman Courage, he adopts the tone of a tale because, he says, “I realize how difficult it is to tell a true story, especially when you don’t know it. In storytelling, you invent to tell the truth.”
Jean-Claude Grumberg excels in this modesty of saying the most serious things with the lightness of love.
French camps
Her mother was born in Paris in 1907 to parents from Brody, in Galicia, a city today in Ukraine which had ten thousand Jews in 1939 and only one in 1945. She lived through two world wars and twice the concentration camps. . In 14-18, in a little-known episode, France imprisoned those who, by reason of their birth, could have been spies for Austria-Hungary. The family was then sent back to Brody, which according to the coincidences of History was sometimes part of Austria-Hungary, sometimes of Galicia, sometimes of Poland, Ukraine or Belarus. The family returned to Paris but lost their father, Zacharie, during the Second World War, assassinated at Auschwitz.
I know so little about you, Mom.
In the evening of his life, Jean-Claude Grumberg realizes the place his mother held: “Mom, I am older than you ever were, and it is only now that I become aware of your loneliness and my indifference. I see us again at the table. You come and serve soup to the two clampins who are in front of you (there was also Maxime, Jean-Claude’s brother), the glasses immersed in their respective books, which you could not read.”
Suzanne, unable to read or write, began to learn on her own late in life, until, to the surprise of her son, she asked Wuthering Heights which she read completely in two years.
-Suzanne, as a child, had experienced the cruelest anti-Semitism when she was asked to take off her shoes to look at her hooked feet!
Admirable story about the Shoah and its opposite: survival and love
This book is also that of a man’s twilight when he writes: “Everything must disappear… It’s my turn to get used to it. The notices on the stores have become shorter and shorter. For sale, For sale, For rent… For me everything has already almost disappeared, until to the tears that stagnate in my blind eye which will return to dust, sand or ashes.”
Jean-Claude Grumberg with his self-deprecation says that “If I had been braver, I would not have gone to the theater, I would have become a thief. I became, moreover, a thief of everyone’s stories to make books out of them.” We will add that it was to our greatest happiness.
⇒ When the earth was flat | Story | Jean-Claude Grumberg | Threshold, 156 pp., €19, digital €14
EXTRACT
“Rehashing, such is the lot of old scribblers. Alas, wherever I am, whatever I do, I ruminate. And that is nothing. The misfortune, the real misfortune, is that I am old and without hope. The children around me today, I feel them happy from time to time, but without hope, and the adults, without hope.
