Can One Still Be Both French and Jewish?

“Alyah,” by Eliette Abecassis, translated from the French into Hebrew (as “B’ein li Moledet”) by Ilan Penn; Penn Publishing and Yedioth Books, 367 pages. 

 

One day, Esther Vidal, who is no other than Eliette Abecassis, a literature teacher, enters her classroom in a school located in a Paris suburb where most of the students are second- and third-generation North African immigrants. Before Vidal has even set her bag down, a 15-year-old student gets up and asks, “Teacher, are you a Jew-girl?”

 

The teacher is flustered – either by the question hurled at her or because a few minutes earlier she had been engaged in a very intimate, amorous texting dialogue with a writer. “Let us embrace and not speak of it again,” he wrote her just before she entered the classroom. “Where and when” she had texted back – before being assaulted by the question about her origins. The student is unrelenting: “Teacher, you’re not answering me. Are you a Jew-girl?”

 

Esther, whose name is clearly Jewish, feels faint. Throughout the school year she had been able to evade discussion of her origins, even though the students, who came from more than 15 national backgrounds, were aware of it.

“What’s your problem?” she snaps back at the student.

“If you are a Jew-girl, does that mean you are a Zionist?”

 

“She’s a Zionist! We will eliminate her!” another student says in a whisper.

The classroom rings with a cacophony of shouts. “It’s not the Jew-boys who bother me. The problem is the Zionists.”

“And the Jews.”

 

“There’s no difference!”

 

“It’s true, they are killing our brothers the Palestinians!”

 

“We’ll get rid of them all!”

 

The class is in an uproar. Everyone is shouting and hurling racist slogans at Vidal, and the Jews in general. Facing them, Esther feels as though she is suffocating; she can hardly catch her breath. At that moment of powerlessness the principal bursts into the classroom and the students fall silent.

 

“Can you even tell me who the Jews are?” she asks the student who had led the offensive.

 

“They are the ones who are murdering Palestinian children,” he replies.

 

In those moments Esther feels trapped, caught between the hatred of her students and her correspondent’s messages of love. Deep down she knows she is helpless not only in the face of the hatred, but also that there is no chance the fledgling affair with Julien, the writer, will evolve into a love story. Against this background she arrives at the conclusion that her life in her native land may be at an end. The country that vouchsafed the fundamental values of human rights seems to be turning its back on her, as Julien comes to symbolize a hopeless love with no future.

 

At the end of the novel, we witness a painful parting: Esther and Julien cannot fulfill the love that binds them. In parting from him she also feels as if she is tearing the umbilical cord that connects her and her family to France... Read more.