Over this time the deportees’ own understanding of their situation also changed. While at first most considered their experience a personal one, beginning in the 70s there was an increasing recognition among Jews of the collective aspect of the genocide. In her text, Kofman struggles with the ambiguities of public and private identity, and with the seeming paradox of being both Jewish and French.The Spanish Civil War, fought between Republicans and Nationalist rebels from 1936 to 1939, left Spain exhausted, broke and bitter. While the two sides had neither the energy nor the resources to keep fighting, the war continued in some senses many years after its official end. Years after Franco’s Nationalist victory, there were still pockets of resistance in the form of the maquis, guerrilla fighters still living in hiding . Leftist leaders and intellectuals were in exile in Europe and Latin America, especially Mexico. After peace was declared, the victors continued to punish the losers with forced labor camps, imprisonment and executions. Exhumations of Nationalist soldiers and frequent memorial rallies held by the fascists continued to spark violence against the erstwhile Republicans, while the famine years created by Franco’s policy of economic independence also affected the former Republicans more acutely . In fact, Spain’s economic situation was actually worse in the years after the war than during. Rodoreda’s protagonist in El carrer de les Camèlies goes hungry in the postwar years, reflecting a reality for a large portion of Spain’s population. She also becomes a prostitute after her first lover, with whom she lived, is put in prison and then killed after the authorities learn, or claim to learn, that “durant la guerra havia estat d’un comité [republicà]” . [“he’d been on a [Republican] committee during the war” ] Prostitution was a common occupation for single or widowed women, especially Republican war widows, indoor grow trays who could not claim a pension . The Spanish population during the Franco years was ruled by fear. “The continually reinforced message,” writes Antonio Sánchez, “was that Franco and his regime meant peace, while liberal democracy meant chaos and death.
It followed therefore that for Spaniards to enjoy peace, they had to give up freedom, to which they were unsuited” . “Franco’s peace” meant that the population exchanged certain freedoms for the promise that the Civil War would not be repeated. During this time, there was a general feeling in the population that no good could come of talking about politics, or even thinking about it. Sometimes, in the text, the narrator is unable to give an explanation of why something might have happened, giving the impression of a universe in which things happen for no apparent reason. In real life during this time, people could not or chose not to talk about the real reasons for things like the famine, giving a similar impression of a universe in which cause and effect have an uneasy relationship. Memorialization of the Civil War began while Franco was still in power. In 1959 Franco finished construction on the Valle de los Caídos , a monument ostensibly constructed to heal the rift between Republicans and Nationalists after the civil war. Located near the Escorial palace outside of Madrid, the Valle de los Caídos includes a basilica topped with the largest cross in the world. In the surrounding valley, 40,000 mostly Nationalist soldiers are buried. Inside the Basilica are the tombs of Franco and Primo de Rivera, the President of the Falange party executed by the Republicans in 1936. Yet, built partially with forced labor by Republican political prisoners and dominated by massive religious icons, the Valle de los Caídos appears more as a monument to fascist victory than to national healing.2 Today, Spain is deliberating what to do with the Valle de los Caídos. Some wish to incorporate a museum that explains the Franco years and the history of the monument. Artist Leo Bassi has satirically suggested converting the site to “Francolandia” following the model of Disneyland .
Still others, notably those in the conservative Partido popular, wish to leave the site as it is. Rodoreda published El Carrer de las Camèlies in 1966, seven years after work was finished on the Valle de los Caídos. Franco was still in power and would be for another 9 years. In many ways, the war still had not ended. While the country was faring better economically, this success, combined with Franco’s anticommunist stance, made his regime more palatable to powers like the US and Britain, and Spain was attracting tourists . It seemed as though the world had decided to overlook Franco’s oppression if the country were safe, anticommunist and economically and politically stable. Reflecting this time of hopeless stasis, Rodoreda’s protagonist is continually looking backwards, unable to move forward in her life. By the 1960s, however, economic liberalization and the cultural changes brought by Spanish migration to other European countries did begin to loosen Franco’s grip on Spanish culture. Yet even after his death in 1975 it was a number of years before Spain could start a society-wide conversation about the civil war. A “pacto de silencio” [pact of silence] between political parties after Franco died, intended to help the country avoid another civil war, made a national conversation about the past impossible, while also leaving statues and other images of the Francoist regime intact. Tellingly, the first history of the civil war was written by an Englishman, Hugh Thomas3. Spain is still taking first steps toward memorializing the civil war and postwar periods, as well as toward thinking through how and what to memorialize. In 2007 Spain passed the Law of Historical Memory, a law even whose name is problematic that, on the one hand, offers support to those who want to identify those buried in mass graves and, on the other, also calls for the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings . Memory, it seems, also involves a measure of forgetting. The country is currently in the throes of a “memory boom”—a national hunger for information, testimony and memorials—that France experienced in the early 1970s and, at the same time, is grappling with how to treat the tangible monuments of Francoist rule.
One of the difficulties of creating a monument to a historical moment like the occupation of Paris is how to account for the diverse experiences of those who lived through it, while at the same time creating something that expresses collective experience. The monument must both acknowledge the uniqueness of individual experience and invite or allow a visitor to access those experiences to the extent that he or she can. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Sarah Kofman struggles with the same dilemma. On the one hand, she seeks to avoid making her experience representative of collective experience, since to do so would fail to acknowledge the specificity of others’ individual experiences. On the other hand, a purely personal text would be inaccessible to the reader with whom she would like to share her memories. In expressing this second concern, I am already using a spatial metaphor: Kofman’s concern is with creating a textual space that allows the reader to enter, but that is, at the same time, her private space. Kofman does not write directly about the purpose of her narrative or her vision of it. Her structural and thematic emphasis on space and its permeability, however, vertical grow racks for sale make an edifice of her text. If a monument, in the modern sense of the word, is the combination of memory and space, then we may say that Kofman has written a monument in text. A major, if not the major, theme of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is the unstable distinction between the public and private realms. On every level of the text, from her depiction of her life on Rue Ordener and Rue Labat to the chapter organization, Kofman closely examines how identity—hers and the reader’s—is not simply a question of how a private “me” relates to the outside world. The structure of the chapters, Kofman’s use of intertextuality and the content of her memoir all work together to create an intersubjective space, a “home” with a door open to the reader. Rue Ordener Rue Labat chronicles Kofman’s experiences as a child during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Rue Ordener and Rue Labat are two streets in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, separated by Rue Marcadet. The 18th had a large population of Eastern European Jews at least since the first pogroms there in 1880. . According to a special census ordered by the German authorities of Jews in the occupied zone, by 1940 the 18th arrondissement had the second largest Jewish population in Paris. and Jarrassé. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman mentions none of this historical context. In this text, Rue Ordener and Rue Labat define spatial and temporal zones specific to Kofman’s experience. Rue Ordener is the spatial representation of her life with her family before the occupation, and, after her father’s arrest and deportation, a symbol of her mother’s influence. It is the zone of Judaism, family and private life. Before his arrest, Kofman’s life on Rue Ordener was conducted in Yiddish and revolved around the Jewish rituals led by her father, a rabbi. Rue Labat, where she and her mother flee to escape the Gestapo and French authorities who had already deported her father, defines the zone of “mémé”, a beautiful gentile woman who hides Kofman and her mother for the duration of the war4. There, life is no longer ordered by her father and the Jewish rituals he conducted. Instead, mémé’s Christian, French way of life structures Kofman’s experience. Rue Labat is the zone of Christianity and life in public: while her mother must hide in a back bedroom, Kofman can leave the apartment on Rue Labat as the supposed Christian daughter of mémé. Over the course of the war, mémé gains a larger and larger place in Kofman’s mind and heart. She showers her with love and attention, even sewing her new clothes. Mémé also introduces Kofman to Jewish thinkers like Freud and Bergson, and, more generally, to an academic and intellectual milieu she did not previously have access to. Despite all of the horrors of the war and occupation, Kofman remembers it partially as an idyll that allows mémé and her to enjoy one another’s company without interference . [Now I even dreaded the end of the war! ] After the liberation of Paris, Kofman returns to life with her mother and siblings and pines for mémé. Life with her mother during this time is difficult. Her mother beats her, withholds food and cuts the electricity at night to prevent her from studying, yet Kofman manages to go off to the university. The text ends with her reflections on mémé’s death. I mentioned above that we may conceive of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat as a meditation on the uneasy relationship between public and private. The sections of bombed-out buildings that appear in the text are emblematic of Kofman’s experience of the dissolution of the distinction between these realms. The next day we went out to see the damage. Almost all the nearby apartment buildings had been destroyed, and the sight of the ruins—only a few sections of wall still standing—made a great impression on me”] A single section of wall shows not just the exterior of the building, but also the interior dwelling. Without the roof and other walls, the private life of an individual or a family is on display, visible from the street. For Kofman in occupied Paris, many of the things that were previously private become public. Religion, for instance, is traditionally a private affair in France. After the revolution, French people became citoyens or citoyennes, shorn of religion and ethnicity in the eyes of the state. During the occupation, this normally private identity was literally brought into the public sphere, symbolized by the yellow stars sewn on Jews’ overcoats for appearance in public. The opposite also occurs in Kofman’s story: what was formerly public becomes private. Eating is a public act, and keeping kosher is an act of community with other Jews. In Kofman’s story, dietary rules become secret, private information. In order to survive, Kofman must not reveal her unwillingness to disobey those rules.