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Cloé Korman is a novelist and teacher in Seine-Saint-Denis. From her Jewish identity, family marked by the Shoah and her father's fight against anti-Semitism, she draws the strength to write a manifesto for a contemporary, radical and subtle anti-racism.
Of her, the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci would have said that she is an organic intellectual, a woman who, trained at the École normale supérieure, one of the symbols of the republican elite, built in daily contact with students of working-class neighborhoods, of racialized children and adults, a concrete political thought, refined and shaken by the test of reality.
Two sentences, two comments heard lead him to question his identity. One of a friend accused her of not showing her identity on Passover : " If you are going to dine alone instead of being with us, you are not really Jewish. "; the other of a grandmother fearing that she would be too visible with her hair loose, " You look like a Jewess ".
Anti-Semitism in France Continues to Kill
" It seems to me essential to defend an atheistic, intellectual Judaism, a Judaism which assumes its character mixed with other cultures, with other countries ... ", she writes, following in the wake of a father who " survived in extremis deportation ”before being the lawyer for the civil party for Licra at the trial of Klaus Barbie in 1987. He also fought for the new acronym of the International League against Antisemitism, the Lica, created in 1928, who in 1972 added racism to his struggles.
The League has evolved since then, and Cloé Korman twice returns to his misunderstanding in the face of what she calls his “ communitarian withdrawal ”, “ until in 2012 he made the dubious choice of the fight against anti-white racism, this concept forged by the extreme right ”. There is anger in this observation, as in that that anti-Semitism is still very present in France, and that it kills.
“ The Jewish population, estimated at around 1% of the French population, polarizes xenophobic hatred in an incredibly disproportionate way - almost half of the phenomenon of racist violence. "However, she wonders," what does recrudescence mean in a country whose state organized in 1942 the Vel 'd'Hiv roundup , then the deportation of the Jews from its territory until 1944 ? "
Racism and anti-Semitism united in hatred
This violence also comes from racialized populations, recalls one who says of her own students: “ There remains, however, a balance of shame and mistrust in my relationship with them : I see every year that I do not tell them that I am Jewish. " Ideological tolerances - to the highest level of the state -" for denial or collaboration in the genocide cannot be separated " from the persistence of anti-Semitic crimes during all these years ".
The career of Maurice Papon , who deported Jewish children before orchestrating the massacre of Algerians on October 17, 1961 , shows among other examples that " denouncing only one of the two speeches [racist or anti-Semitic] at the expense of the other is the best way to lose the fight . " " Frantz Fanon's sentence ," she continues, " When you hear bad things about Jews, raise your ears, we are talking about you ", seems to me to be reversible. (…) There is no difference between Jews and foreigners in the racist mentality. The prosperity of this lie in France today is a dangerous illusion. "
Drancy as a paradigm
Drancy , a place of late memory of the complicity of the French State in the extermination of the Jews of France, of which it recalls that François Hollande was the first president to meditate there in 2012, thus becomes a paradigm of the unthought of the hexagon: " There, in the middle of the poorest residential towers of Île-de-France, whose inhabitants are almost exclusively from so-called visible minorities, black minorities and Arab-Berber, is the city of the crime of the State French. (…) The present coincidence between this place of remembrance of anti-Semitic crimes and the places of relegation of poor France plunges me into unease. "
Honoring memories fairly is not enough. " I believe that the crimes of which my grandparents were witnesses and victims are perpetuated through certain speeches and certain silences, through certain facts and certain inertia : thus the indifference and selfishness which caused the death in the Mediterranean , between 2014 and today, of more than 30,000 people who could not find refuge, unlike my grandparents who were welcomed in Switzerland ( very difficult, but welcomed anyway ) in 1942. "
" A rose is a rose is a rose ..." wrote the Jewish poetess Gertrude Stein, who went astray in the collaboration for a time. Perhaps it is to answer him that at the end of his book, Cloé Korman files a metaphor which invites to go beyond our identities to lead " these combats in a tolerant and pluralist way ", far from the " dead world " of racism, " a garden with statues where we would look like death to ourselves until death ensued, until the rose was like a rose less than a rose, but a dust rose, a rose of thorns, a barbed wire of nightmare. "
♦ Cloé Korman, Tu resembles à une juive , Le Seuil, Paris, published January 2020.