Mavis Gallant’s Jewish Dilemma

A Throwback Thursday Review by Michael Greenstein

Jacques Derrida’s controversial pronouncements – “Jewish is not Jewish” and “anyone or no one may be a Jew” – apply to Mavis Gallant whose mother Benedictine (Bennie) Wiseman was Jewish but disowned by her daughter: “I had a mother who should not have had children.” As significant as her relationship to her non-mother is, her work on Alfred Dreyfus is equally telling, for although she devoted many years to this cause célèbre, her study never came to fruition. In “An Introduction” to Home Truths she chronicles her obsession with the French captain: “It happened that by the mid-seventies I had been reading virtually nothing for two years except documents and books about the Dreyfus case.” Captain Dreyfus was a French Army officer wrongfully accused of high treason in 1894 and spent four and a half years in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island before being cleared of the charges. Fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism surrounding his case divided French society. “If one can fix his personality through his letters and diaries and from the recollections of those who knew him, Dreyfus was a complex person, secretive and reserved.”

Neither through her journalism nor through her fiction was Gallant able to fix his personality in the double sense of repair and pin down. “I once dreamed that we had met and that he had nothing to say to me, which is probably how it might have been in real life.” The speechless soldier is remote from the writer because he chose a life of rules and restrictions, yet “of living by the book – and such a thin volume.” Gallant’s thicker volume contrasts with his, and if they are opposites there is still a trace of a doppelganger in their relationship: “We – Dreyfus and I – were opposites in every sense, and had he been living he probably would have told me to leave his life alone.” She shares his exile and aloneness. “I had to stand in his shoes, to assume, as best I could, an alien ambition … an alien intelligence.” To paraphrase Derrida: Dreyfus is not Dreyfus. Bennie Wiseman and Alfred Dreyfus form part of Gallant’s unresolved identity and haunt her fiction. Orphaned early and sent to seventeen schools, Gallant was educated in multiple perspectives; she was alone in the company of characters, settings, and plot.

Consider “Baum, Gabriel, 1935 – ( )” whose eponymous protagonist is born in the wrong place at the wrong time – dislocated from parents and birthplace; and who, like Dreyfus, serves in the French military. Each of the five sections or acts of this story examines his predicament from a different perspective with shifts in time disorienting the reader. The parenthesis in the title indicates that Gabriel is still alive, but its open-endedness runs counter to bracketed enclosures in the story, so that the title suggests an epitaph for his life. The first section, “Uncle August,” refers to Gabriel’s uncle and only surviving relative after the Second World War. Their family name, Baum or tree, is tragically ironic, for an August tree, which would normally bear fruit, finds no counterpart in Uncle August who dies without any heirs. Unlike Gabriel’s mother and father who died during the Holocaust, Uncle August got out of Europe in plenty of time for Argentina where he owned property. Uncle and nephew have both been uprooted: “He was as different from Gabriel as a tree is from the drawing of one; nevertheless Gabriel saw in him something of the old bachelor he too might become.” The narrator sketches this truncated family tree and hints at an unfulfilled future; broken families and fractured narratives go hand in hand throughout Gallant’s fiction.

The narrator gradually fills in Gabriel’s past in Germany and his present circumstances as an actor in Paris. He is now twenty-five and recently discharged from the French army after twenty months in Algeria. “Notice of his uncle’s arrival reached him at the theater seating two hundred persons where he had a part in a play about J.K. Huysmans.” Gallant’s reliance on numbers demonstrates the precision of her journalism, but in her fiction these numerical values often lend themselves to irony and mystery. “The play explained Huysmans’ progress from sullen naturalism to mystical Christianity.” Gallant presents Gabriel’s role, which regresses in numbers: “Gabriel had to say, ‘But Joris Karl has written words of penetrating psychology,’ and four or five other things.” Gallant’s penetrating psychology works through irony and indirection.

At the Bristol Hotel the two Baums dine under the narrator’s scrutinizing eyes and ears which examine language. Uncle August speaks German and Spanish “and the pale scrupulous French and English that used to be heard at spas and in the public rooms of large, airy hotels.” Multilingual and cosmopolitan, he speaks the language that Gallant parses and articulates. His manners are German, “pre-war – pre-1914, that is.” Since the story encompasses two World Wars and the Algerian War, we are in the war light of a war zone acted out across Europe. “To Gabriel, his uncle seemed to conceal an obsolete social mystery, but a few Central Europeans, still living, would have placed him easily as a tight, unyielding remainder of the European shipwreck.” With few survivors, Mitteleuropa goes down with the Titanic. If Gallant’s Europe is a kind of collage, she guards its borders scrupulously, uncovering meaning at its margins.

The old man scrutinizes his nephew to see if he is worthy to inherit his belongings. “ ‘I have a respected name to protect. I owe it to my late father.’ He meant his own name: August Ernest Baum, b. Potsdam 1899 – ( ).” The fruit does not fall far from this tree from the turn of the century and lasting until a parenthesis. After August tries to determine whether Gabriel’s parents were actually married, the narrative shifts focus to Gabriel’s health. “His hair, which was dark and abundant, fell in locks on a surprisingly serene forehead.” Yet this serenity is undercut by two conditions: the first has to do with his interrupted breathing; his “second complaint was that he seemed to be haunted … by a child.” Children and childhood haunt Gallant and her characters – “a small, invisible version of himself, a Gabriel whose mauled pride he was called on to save, whose claims against life he was forced to meet with whatever thin means time provided, whose scores he had rashly promised to settle before realizing that debt and payment never interlock.” These parallel clauses delineate his traumatic past and account for his suspended breathing, his pride, and his struggle to make ends meet. The embedded child in parentheses awakens suddenly: “His uncle’s amazing question and the remark that followed it awoke the wild child, who began to hammer on Gabriel’s heart.” Gallant revives François Truffaut’s film The Wild Child, even as she penetrates her protagonist and hammers home truths.

From Gabriel’s heart the narrator shifts focus to an objective correlative to encapsulate European history: “He fixed his attention on a bottle – one of the dark bottles whose labels bear facsimiles of gold medals earned at exhibitions no one has ever heard of, in cities whose names have been swept off the map: Breslau 1884, Dantzig 1897, St. Petersburg 1901.” Bottled-up emotions have been emptied and rewards have disappeared. August describes visiting Gabriel’s parents in 1930 when his father was writing satirical poetry and his mother “had a clockwork bear that she kept winding up and sending round the table.” Her circling bear represents innocence, history, and financial status in August’s eyes. “Shut him up,” orders the younger Gabriel, “but Gabriel was struggling for breath.” His two conditions surface during this disturbing outing with his uncle who has lost everything except his name. August returns to South America complaining that Paris is nothing more than an émigré way station.

His uncle writes letters which Gabriel reads in La Méduse, a bar close to the Montparnasse railway station where television actors often gather. “Glancing up from one of his uncle’s letters he saw the misted window in the mirror behind the bar. In a polluted winter fog neon glowed warmly – the lights of home.” Atmosphere rather than architecture constitutes his home suffused in Parisian grisaille. When he learns of his uncle’s death, he invents a marble memorial:

Father: 1909 – 1943 (probably)

Mother: 1909 – 1943 (probably)

Uncle: 1899 – 1977

Gabriel: 1935 – ( )

Whereas earlier August had his blank parenthesis, now that he is dead the only parenthesis remaining is Gabriel’s. Underneath his own name he draws a line to underscore the end of the Baum tree, but this doesn’t provide a satisfactory conclusion, as if somehow all the numbers don’t add up. “Gabriel, with his feet on the finish line and with uncounted Baums behind him, was a variable quantity.” The first act or section ends with this memorial in his head – Gallant’s memorial to the millions of lives lost.

The second act or section, “Gabriel’s Liselotte,” opens on a brighter note: “Soon after Gabriel’s uncle’s visit, a generation of extremely pretty German girls suddenly blossomed in Paris.” This fecundity contrasts with the failed Baum blossoming. In this Parisian “blurred reflection” Gabriel imagines everyone’s life as “a half-worked crossword puzzle” with “problems set in code.” He comes face-to-face with Liselotte: “Daughter of a dead man and a whore of a mother (which seemed to be a standard biography then)”, she shares some of that biography with Gallant, the former journalist at Montreal’s Standard. Like the mathematical parentheses of dates, this biographical bracket contains lives. In Parc Monceau she practices her French, while Gabriel counts six, seven, eight shades of green in a pastoral colour scheme. On the bus he takes to visit her across the Seine there are old men “wearing slivers of ribbon to mark this or that war.” These slivers remind him that he “had promised the child-Gabriel he would never marry a German.” He thinks she would not enjoy being Liselotte Baum after being Liselotte Pfligge, and he reverses his name to Gabriel Pfligge – these crossovers signifying the exchanges between German and French identities throughout the story. When she leaves Paris, her train “was blurred, as if he were looking at it through Liselotte’s tears.” This blurred vision is part of blurring European identities.

The next section, “The Interview,” begins with Gabriel’s uncle sending him letters from abroad, but the focus soon turns to the acting scene in the bar La Méduse. The transition from letters to bar focusses on Gabriel’s role in the Algerian war. After his return from Algeria, he continues to take an interest in the war, but the “excitement died down, and then no one knew what to put in the magazines and political weeklies any more.” Gallant’s satire merges with a post-war atmosphere that hovers about Paris like a yellow fog rubbing its back on windowpanes. The narrator glides from Britanny with its artichoke glut, to the new ecumenicity seeping out of Rome to Western European consumer society. The moral wounds inflicted on society are equally inflicted on Gabriel whose author satirizes his situation: “Between jobs, he read articles about people who said they had been made unhappy by paper napkins and washing machines.” All the headlines converge in The Medusa with its mythological and monstrous roles: the Medusa’s snakes contrast with Gabriel’s dark and abundant locks that fall on his serene forehead.

Most of the customers in La Méduse wait for a television call, while at the bar second-generation émigré actors cluster. Gabriel thinks of them as bachelor orphans who have been everywhere, only to be skewered by Gallant’s satire: “– to Brazil, where they could not understand the language, and to New York, where they complained about the climate, and to Israel, where they were disappointed with the food.” She slays her gorgons in their various guises. Dieter Pohl, a Bavarian of Gabriel’s age, enters this mix. He plays in films about the Occupation, making his way up from private to captain à la Dreyfus. He wears his comic and tragic masks: “He had two good facial expressions, one for victory and one for defeat.” Another character, journalist Briseglace, suddenly enters the bar to declare that the Montparnasse railway station is to be torn down and a dark tower to be built in its place.

With all of these props, La Méduse itself becomes a theatre in which history is acted out. From Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa to the broken ice of Briseglace’s name, the sinking of the Titanic is re-enacted. His name also refers to a broken mirror, which belongs within the framework of deformities and shattered representations of reality. Dressed in black, Gabriel and his generation contrast with the older journalist whose shabby appearance includes a tie “made of some yellow Oriental stuff” and whose clothes look as if they have been stitched by nuns on a convent sewing machine. The younger generation’s “haircuts still spoke of military service and colonial wars,” whereas Briseglace’s “straggling, grayish locks” derive from the Latin Quarter of the nineteen-forties. A surreal, cinematic, expressionistic atmosphere hovers around the bar with its blurring of history. “Gabriel’s only feeling, seeing him, was disgust at what it meant to grow old.” The real interview in “The Interview” is the look between generations, an overlapping of historical events through the twentieth century in an imaginary fifteenth district, which absorbs Paris’s Le Théâtre du Soleil.

The theatricality of this scene appears six weeks later in the pages of a left-wing weekly as “Gabriel B., spokesman for the flotsam of Western Europe.” Briseglace’s portrayal identifies Gabriel as more German than Jewish, as one who gnaws veal cutlets at the Wienerwald and devours potato dumplings at Tannhaüser. Furthermore, this Wagnerian portrait paints Gabriel as the Prince of Bohemia. “For Gabriel B. this bizarre nourishment constitutes a primal memory, from infancy to age twelve.” Although Gabriel corrects his age from twelve to seven, the primal memory nevertheless awakens the wild child within him. The article concludes with a statement about Western European consumer society being not so much an economic condition as a state of mind. The journalist has awakened the protagonist: “Gabriel’s escape from annihilation in two real wars (even though one had been called something else) had left him with reverence for unknown forces.” These unknown forces morph into the next act, “Unsettling Rumors.”

Unsettling rumours concern the changes in Montparnasse from the transformation of La Méduse to the unsettling of history and world order. The protagonist ages: “As he grew older and balder, stouter and more reflective, Gabriel found himself at odds with the few bachelors he still saw in Montparnasse.” From Kafka’s questers at castles to James Joyce’s Dubliner Gabriel in “The Dead” (with its shattering mirror), Baum, Gabriel is a flâneur whose friends “strolled along the boulevards through a surf of fallen leaves.” All adrift in anachronisms, they have “no way of measuring time,” a task that falls upon their scrupulous author whose feminism comes to the fore: “His friends preferred films in which women presented no obstacles and created no problems and were shown either naked or in evening dress.” Dieter’s comment on their friendship becomes an object of satire, much as his false status as a colonel in a make-believe war: “Years and years without a disagreement. It is a male situation. Women would never be capable of such a thing.” If Gabriel immerses himself “in the present moment,” then events such as the Yom Kippur War unsettle that moment. He has many roles to play, while the “child-Gabriel” grows still. La Méduse does undergo a metamorphosis with each table containing a postcard advertising the café. “The card showed a Medusa jellyfish with long eyelashes and a ribbon on its head.” Gallant ensnares the myth of the most celebrated meeting-place for television actors in Paris.

Which brings the play to its final act, “The Surrender.” Dieter hears that a thirteen-hour television project about the Occupation is to be launched in the spring. He says that they just need a few people to be deported and jump off the train. Some old-timers hear that they want to deport the Poles, others hear that they are rounding up foreign-born Socialists, while others hear that twelve Jews are to be run over by a locomotive. This hearsay soundtrack is part of the ever-changing directions within the short story. Dieter fills in the blanks for Gabriel: the film begins with a group of Resistance fighters jumping out of a train. This group includes an anti-Semitic aristocrat, a peasant with a Provençal accent, a Protestant intellectual, a priest who doubts his vocation, and three Jews – an aged rabbi, a black-market operator, “and one anything.” Gabriel decides that he will be the “one anything” – a unique everybody and nobody, a mysterious Dreyfus, a Derridean arbitrary entity. Only the aristo and the aged rabbi survive and return to Paris for the Liberation. When Gabriel asks Dieter about “the one anything,” he tells him that he is the wrong age at forty-three “to play a Jew.” For Baum, Gabriel the numbers never add up, for he is out of place and time.

So, Gabriel changes roles to become a German officer: “the last of the Baums tried on his new uniform.” The uniform is a measure of the man’s age but seen from a distance everyone in uniform looks the same. These optical illusions go in and out of focus as Gabriel examines himself in the blur of history: “Gabriel in his new uniform seemed not just to be looking at himself in a glass but actually he was walking through it. He moved through a liquid mirror, back and forth. With each crossing his breath became a little shorter.” While this crossing mirrors the border crossings between France and Germany in Gabriel’s mind, Dieter phones his cousin Helga to tell her that he will not be able to attend her wedding because of delays in filming the surrender. While Helga talks to Dieter “without drawing breath,” Gabriel breathes history: these breathing spaces measure a life and the lifespan of a century.

The carnivalesque actors are Turks, North Africans, and Portuguese. “Gabriel had to agree that they were a bedraggled-looking lot.” Dieter recalls how in the sixties there used to be real Frenchmen, real Germans, and authentic Jews who were guided by first-hand accounts of atrocities. Now, any “true cast of players” would be trying to imitate their grandfathers. “They were at one remove too many.” Gliding among real, true, and authentic Germans and Frenchmen, Dieter observes the tops of houses edging the park: “They grow real trees on them” – like Colonel Baum, who is and is not a real tree.

Photographs complicate this sense of reality, as Dieter addresses Gabriel: “Of course, you were a real soldier.” The uncanny self returns to haunt Gabriel: “Why is it, said Gabriel to himself, that when I was playing a wretched, desperate victim no one ever asked to have his picture taken with me? The question troubled him, seeming to proceed from the younger Gabriel, who had been absent for some time now. He hoped this unruly tenant was not on his way back, screaming for a child’s version of justice, for an impossible world.” The return of the repressed in this haunted house of fiction is inevitable; absent child and parent lurk in the shadows of Montreal, Paris, and Berlin. Dieter talks about returning home to Bavaria and ecology, which causes Gabriel to have the most extraordinary view of the park: “All the greens in it became one dull colour, as if thunderous clouds had gathered low in the sky.” Cast and overcast return to the earlier view of Parc Monceau with Liselotte where he counts several shades of green.

Dieter shows Gabriel photographs of his cousin Helga’s wedding. Her husband’s granddaughter Erna is present at this mismatch. On her head a wreath of daisies contrasts with Medusa’s wreath of snakes. More importantly, she is dwarfed by an accordion, which “seemed to be falling apart; she had all she could do to keep it together.” Indeed, the marriage contains its own divorce, as the wild child relates to innocent Erna.

Dieter’s imaginary plans for Gabriel’s future include a room in his house back in Germany. “Yes, and the younger Gabriel, revived and outraged and jealous, thrashing around in his heart, saying, ‘Think about empty rooms, letters left behind, cold railway stations washed down with disinfectant, dark glaciers of time’.” These dark glaciers may begin in 1935, only to continue in the blank of parentheses. He knows nothing about Bavaria, except jumping out of trains; only in films has he seen mist lifting or paths lost in ferns. Gabriel breathes “at a good rhythm” as an infinity of surrenders in colour and in black-and-white precede this surrender. Application forms and questionnaires lead him to this juncture: “Baum, Gabriel, b. 1935, Germany, nat. French, mil. serv. obl. fulf.” Alongside this bureaucratic path “country words” run in his head – dense thickets, lizards and snakes, a thrush’s egg, and dark thorny leaves. The pastoral list goes on, but those snakes return to Medusa, who fails to protect her protagonist. The story ends with Dieter announcing that his father lived to be ninety – a longevity that comments on Gabriel’s empty parentheses, a life bracketed in and among borders.

In the end, Derrida speaks for Dreyfus and Gallant.

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About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature.
He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe

Book Details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

• Publication date: Aug. 7 2018

• Print length: 304 pages

• ISBN-10: 0735253382

• ISBN-13: 978-0735253384