Quelli che non dormivano: Diario, 1944 1946

by Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, Claudia Marinelli (Translator)

Parigi, 18 luglio 1944. Gli americani sono già sbarcati in Normandia, la liberazione di Parigi è vicina. Il marito di Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, André, membro della resistenza ebraica, quella sera non torna a casa. Catturato dai tedeschi, è stato caricato sull'ultimo convoglio in partenza per Buchenwald. Jacqueline non lo sa e lo aspetta. Questo diario è il racconto emblematico di quei giorni infiniti di attesa, di speranza e disperazione. E intanto i ricordi dei tempi felici si accalcano nella testa di Jacqueline. Tutto si mescola nel suo cuore in pena: le notizie sul trattamento riservato ai detenuti, i rifugi di fortuna presso i conoscenti, l'ansia per la figlioletta. Nel frattempo la capitale francese si mobilita, innalza barricate contro i nemici. E mentre le sue strade si riempiono di grida di gioia per la resa dei tedeschi, Jacqueline non sa ancora nulla della sorte di André. Solo da lì a poco scoprirà che anche lei potrà essere partecipe di quell'allegria. Così si conclude la sua testimonianza, insieme intima e universale, ma non le sue riflessioni. Al diario privato fa seguito una sorta di diario pubblico, in cui l'autrice si chiede che diritto abbiano i sopravvissuti di essere felici, dopo aver conosciuto l'orrore che ha sconvolto l'Europa.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, World War II, France, History, Classics, Historical

185 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar (1909-87), the daughter of Jules Perquel, a financier and newspaper editor, and Ellen Allatini, was brought up in the Paris suburb of Passy. In 1928 she went to the Sorbonne and in 1930 married André Amar (1908-90), who was at the École Normale Supérieure; he was the son of a banker who had come to Paris from Salonika. The Amars' daughter Sylvie was born in 1934; meanwhile Jacqueline wrote magazine articles. When war broke out the family lived in Bordeaux, Marseille, Nice and nine different places in Paris, often separately because André was first in the French army and then joined a Jewish resistance network. After 1945 the Amars largely devoted their lives to Jewish causes. In 1957 Jacqueline's diary for 18th July-25th August 1944, together with some of her post-war articles, was published as Ceux qui ne dormaient pas, translated by Persephone Books as Maman, What Are We Called Now?

(from http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/jaqu...)

Reviews

[Kirsty]

Persephone Books are a real treat for me. I love that moment when I open one of their beautiful dove grey covers for the first time, and always take a moment to admire the undoubtedly beautiful endpapers, before embarking on a story which I'm always certain I will enjoy. I was lucky enough to be able to reserve a copy of Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar's Maman, What Are We Called Now? from my local library, as it's a copy I've had difficulty picking up elsewhere.

Maman, What Are We Called Now? collects together a short journal and articles written by Paris resident, Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, during the Second World War, and directly afterwards. First published in its original French in 1957, and in English in this translation by Francine Yorke in 2015, the book is the 115th title on the Persephone list. It also includes a long, and highly informative preface written by biographer Caroline Moorehead, in which she provides a lot of information about both their families, and their backgrounds. I really appreciated both the specific context, and the personal details which she gives; they certainly add to the whole.

Mesnil-Amar's original journal was written between July and August 1944, and begun on the day she learnt that her husband was missing. Moorehead contextualises this well, commenting: 'In the last frenzied weeks of the German occupation of Paris her husband André had disappeared. She wanted to record her thoughts, her fears, her desperate hopes, her memories, along with a description of Paris itself... When she abandoned her diary, five weeks later, Paris was free and André, miraculously, was alive.'

Both Jacqueline and André were Jewish, but were 'totally assimilated', seeing themselves as French citizens first, and Jewish second. André joined the Jewish resistance, which had begun in Warsaw in 1942. After being tricked by the Gestapo, he was sent to Auschwitz on the last deportation train, on the 17th of August 1944. Astonishingly, he managed to escape from the moving train, and walked the 50 kilometres back to Paris. After being reunited with his wife and young daughter Sylvie, he and Jacqueline helped to set up a vital network of information for deported Jews, helping them to locate their families after the Holocaust.

Throughout Mesnil-Amar's heartrending journal, the reader is made party to her extreme anxiety, uncertainty, and grief. On the 25th of July, just a week after André's disappearance, Mesnil-Amar writes: 'I was straining to hear the slightest sound, longing for the familiar rapid footsteps outside the door, bur they never came. A thousand times I thought I'd heard one of the sounds that are so much a part of the man I love - the jangle of his keys, the click of the door handle, his little smoker's cough, the rustle of a newspaper - and the sound of his cheerful voice calling out his pet name for me from the other end of the flat. But nothing. Complete silence. Always the same all-enveloping silence we endured after the others were arrested.' On the same day, she writes of the clash of information which she has been given by others: 'Everything just adds to the confusion and the horror, it's all black and shadowy... I will sell my rings, I will sell my soul, I will sell my life, but I can't believe even that would be enough.'

Throughout the journal portion of Maman, What Are We Called Now?, Mesnil-Amar lays her panic and vulnerability bare. She writes briefly of members of her family, all of whom are in hiding across the city. She writes, sometimes at length, of the incredibly brave and selfless people around her, and how they have provided herself and Sylvie with help, and with hope. She addresses sections of her journal directly to André, and these are fervent and sincere.

Something which she comes to realise is the disconnect which her husband's disappearance creates. On the 26th of July, Mesnil-Amar reflects: 'This endless walk took me through every part of Paris, so many different cities, each one a part of me, my avenues, my streets, the loveliest and the ugliest, the oldest and the newest, and I walked with my eyes half-closed, all of a sudden a stranger in my own city, separated from it by my grief and yet forever bound to it.' She questions her faith, wondering whether she does believe in God: 'Not every day, alas. And especially not every night... I no longer know who or what to hold on to, what god, what human face, which of the values that used to give meaning to my life.'

Under the rather lovely pen name of Delphine, Jacqueline contributed articles, theatre reviews, and 'light-hearted sketches of society life' to various magazines. After the war, the tone and topics of her writing, unsurprisingly, shifted. Moorehead notes that in these later articles, 'the light-hearted Delphine of the pre-war years had been replaced by a more serious, sadder figure.' One can notice a shift in tone even between the journal and the articles written afterwards; there is a gaping sadness, and a despair which is almost palpable. Both her prose and the translation are fluid and beautiful, and throughout, Jacqueline is astute and highly observant of everything around her. She questions herself relentlessly about why people were resigned to standing by and watching, as the whole of Europe was decimated, and much of its Jewish population was murdered before their very eyes.

I always feel incredibly grateful when I come to read a diary, particularly one as illuminating as Mesnil-Amar's. For me, they provide, by far, the best insight into the author's present. They record details which may otherwise be lost to the annals of history, or perhaps might not be picked up by future historians. Maman, What Are We Called Now? - something which Mesnil-Amar's daughter asked her, picking up as she did on the grip of Nazi Germany, and the deportation of friends - is such an important document, and one which is an absolute privilege to read.

[Rosemary]

The first half of this is Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar's diary of the weeks in 1944 after her husband was arrested. They were French Jews and from a very privileged background, but the German occupation of France from 1940 overturned all of that. Some of the language is lovely, and there are wonderful images.

The second half is compiled from diaries and articles written later, and as the Preface reports, she became increasingly bitter after the war. She seems more angry with the non-Jewish French, whether collaborating or merely apathetic, than with the German Nazi invaders, and I think that's because she had expectations of support from her French acquaintances and was disappointed, but of course had no similar expectations of the Germans. So there's a strong sense of betrayal.

I don't like the title chosen by Persephone for this translation - it suggests a focus on the mother-daughter relationship that's not reflected in the book at all. The husband-wife relationship is the important one. The French title was "Ceux qui ne dormaient pas" (Those who didn't/couldn't sleep), so why not call it "The Sleepless", or something similar?

[Mela]

I know it was short, but I just didn't want to read more (I stopped at page fifty). I got the mood and what the author was saying, but for more information, and knowledge about that part of French history I found interesting lectures on YaleCourses on YouTube (The Dark Years: Vichy France and Resistance).

[Annie 2manybeautifulBooks]

“I have so much admiration for you, the mothers in prison. You knew what fate awaited you, but while you were waiting for the day of departure you went on washing your children’s clothes, darning their socks, combing their hair, and stalwartly teaching them their lessons, as if they were going to grow up and become adults one day, as if the Germans were granting you a respite and were offering you the gift of life, your children’s life. And until the final day, in Block 3, where you slept on the floor with your children until that last icy dawn when the SS tore you from the camp and threw you into the lorries which would take you to the station at Bobigny, until the minute when you were forced to climb into the death wagon and confront the sobbing and the stench, and even throughout the journey, I am certain, you carried on chatting and smiling at your children to reassure them, and perhaps right up to the fatal moment when you reached Auschwitz, where you hugged them tightly to you, while all around dogs were barking and men were shouting and lashing their whips, even in that hellhole spot, so far from France, until the very moment you climbed into the truck that was to take you to the ‘showers’ you’d been promised, until the very end, Jewish mother’s, mothers of all nationalities, French mothers, the ones I know best, who are so brave in adversity, as you went to your death with your children clinging to your sides, your babies in your arms, silent and terrified, desperate for the pathetic little protection you could give them, looking up at you one last time to see your last smile, you never gave up hope did you? Deep in every truly civilised heart, in every truly human heart, there is a kind of mad intrepid hope, and you were hoping, weren’t you, that they would live, that they would be allowed to live, that with your flesh and your blood you might be able to feed them, to rear them, to make men and women of them, worthy to be called human beings, unlike their executioners.”

Ugh a gut-wrenching demonstration of motherhood💔
Recommending this compelling narrative that is surely also an important historical document.

Cut and pasted from my IG shown with the painting..

🎨Massacre of The Innocents by Leon Cogniet

[Sofie Sieling]

This Holocaust diary was incredibly heart-wrenching yet philosophical and authoritative. It took me a while to get through as a matter of an extremely bad reading slump, which I believe I have gotten out of by now. The diary was indeed hard to understand sometimes because of her philosophical mindset and jumping back and forth through the war. I did, however, enjoy that Persephone Books had used footnotes to describe names, groups and such. As you probably know, it was surely not a walk through sunshine on a green alley while reading it.

[Kim]

Exquisitely written. Insightful. Unflinching. Read it and reflect on our current wars, our treatment of refugees, the human condition, our collective responsibility, your own culpability. This is an important book.

[Shatterlings]

I preferred the first half of this, the diary written at the end of the war whilst her husband is missing is beautifully written. The second essay parts are so bitter and filled with anger, rightly so but it does not make for pleasant reading. The title of this makes you think it will be about her daughter but she hardly appears, the main relationship is with her husband.

[Linda]

TRANSLATED BY FRANCINE YORKE
PREFACE BY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD
216pp

The author's husband was arrested and disappeared in July 1944; for the next six weeks his wife kept a diary which is an unparalleled description of the last days of the Occupation in Paris as they actually happened. Photographs by Therese Bonney.

Fascinating in its immediacy.
. . .
I wrote "Fascinating in its immediacy" when I was still only half way through the first part of this book. While that is true, it really does not begin to suggest what an emotional read it turned out to be. The second part of the book deals with Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar's post-war writings and her work at that time trying to reunite families separated by the war, concentration camps, imprisonment. In particular Mesnil-Amar worked with war orphans.

She herself was a young child during WWI and remembered it and wrote about how a child responds, adapts, fantasizes when living through war — though she notes that WWI touched French citizens on a day-to-day basis much less than WWII. Her writing on what these WWII-era children suffered and how to help them and give them a life worth living when their families are all dead is devastating. It brought all the immigrant issues that face us today into sharp and shocking focus. A superb book and one that it is easy to see why Persephone reprinted.

WARNING: Forewards and Afterwords are always an important part of Persephone books, but I have leaned to never read them before I read the book. Too often they contain spoilers that detract from the reading experience. I never wish I had read them first!

[Kathryn]

Horribly upsetting but somehow beautiful at all times, Mesnil-Amar presents an account of the days leading up to the liberation of Paris and the never-ending horror of living on the run in occupied France.
Despite having learned about the period extensively, so much of the information in this book was new and shocking to me - the extent of French collaboration and cruelty is laid bare, with the fates of war orphans brought home in heart-rending detail.

[Lulu]

Ce livre est magnifiquement écrit. Ce n'est pas simplement un journal de guerre, c'est un livre, une oeuvre, comme le dit Assouline. La langue est superbe, et ses réflexions extrêmement bien fondées, émouvantes, et justifiées. Elle devrait être lue et analysée dans les lycées et écoles. Splendide.

[Isabel]

Due to circumstances I read this book alongside On the Other Side; Letters to my Children from Germany 1940-1946 and it was very interesting to see different sides of the same conflict at the same time. The perspective is different of course: Mesnil-Amar being a French Jew and Wolff-Mönckeberg being... well, German, really, and nothing very much besides that. But both women wrote about their "ordinary" day-to-day lives during the same periode. Both ways of writing were intimate, in a way: Mesnil-Amar writing her diary and Wolf-Mönckeberg writing letters to her children. It's private correspondance; in a way it was nothing of my concern. And that, of course, made the experience of what they wrote about, the closest to first-hand a stranger like me could get to know their lives. A stranger both in not knowing them personally, and in not living in the 1940s.

Naturally, a prevalent question was the one of blame, of guilt, of who was at fault, of who should or should not have done what. Mesnil-Amar blames at one point all the Germans, yet Wolff-Mönckeberg wonders whether they, Germans, were in fact all to blame. In a later letter, however, she agrees that all Germans should act humble and realise what has happened in their country and from there to other countries. But also later on Mesnil-Amar rages against the members and parts of the French establishments, that they ought not to have been so obedient towards German orders, so indifferent to Jews, so uncaring. A difficult matter and perhaps no answer to it at all. A very interesting read and compelling writing.

Do buy books at Persephone Books. They will have a hard time when Brexit comes along.

[Michele]

Harrowing but important work by a Frenchwoman living through the occupation during World War II. As Jews, she and her husband are part of the Resistance but she is also the mother of a young girl. After the war, when the full horrors of the fates of the deportees come to light (more than 75,000 Jewish men, women and children were taken out of France forcibly by the Germans, and only about 2,000 returned), she dedicates her life to the fate of the children who were orphaned and especially the ones that survived the concentration camps. The book is a combination of her diary starting in the summer of 1944 and articles and commentaries she wrote following the war. Her scathing assessment of the collaborators, the silent, the hatemongers in the media and more was published in 1957, and pretty much ignored as people were not ready to accept these truths. Ten years later, her work was appreciated as part of an awakening across France about the realities of the Vichy government. The most moving excerpts for me include her later writing about the fate of the surviving children, their damaged psyches, and their lifelong yearning to only have their mothers return.

[The Contented]

A powerful, beautifully written and moving book that should only strengthen our resolve to intervene wherever children are caught up in conflict, wherever children are confined to a ghetto-like existence, wherever children are forcibly separated from their parents, wherever children face starvation, wherever children are arrested or detained on political grounds, wherever children are denied that basic right to a free and happy childhood.

So many years on, what has really changed?

Read this book. Be moved by it. Then make a difference.

#StopTheWaronChildren

[Susannah]

Brilliant, but a difficult read, this is the diary of Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar who lived in France during the Nazi occupation. You can tell she is a ‘professional’ writer because this is so well written, there are some fantastic phrases and descriptions of her life under occupation. The second part has some of her essays published after the war which cover topics of the holocaust and collaboration of some French people and the French government.

[Geraldine]

Beautifully written. And about such a terrible time; the two things seem hard to reconcile. A first hand account from a Jewish woman of living in France during the war (and escaping arrest). I learned a lot from reading this book and would highly recommend it.

[Em]

“Knowledge is like love: the light of knowledge must be fuelled and kept burning, otherwise the facts will shrivel until they are no more than pale abstractions barely weighing on our too swiftly eased consciences.”

[Terri]

I quit reading. It just didn't hold my attention.

[Zoë]

Review coming soon :)

[Chris Lee-Francis]

The photos in the middle and the second section are a one-two punch to the gut

[Sophie]

I struggled with this because the text, though moving, contains a lot of repetition, and refers time and again to a cast of characters with which the reader is unfamiliar (friends, acquaintances, co-conspirators). This would have value as a historical document describing life in Occupied Paris, but as a text to spend time with for its own sake I found it disappointing.

It's worth noting that the diary only takes up the first half of the book; the rest is given over to a collection of the writer's newspaper articles which now feel quite dated and overblown (but presumably not when they were first published in the post-war years).

[Jane Gabin]

These are pages from a journal kept by Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar of Paris, beginning in 1944. She was a writer who, using the pseudonym Delphine, had contributed to many magazines. She and her husband, Andre, were both assimilated Jews who were, according to Caroline Moorehead, who wrote the preface to this edition, “passionate about French culture and the arts.” Then the Germans invaded and occupied France. When Jacqueline begins her journal, they have been living under the Occupation for four years, moving often because they have been hunted, and Andre has been arrested.

The author’s tone is often bitter: “I can still hear the distinguished voice of Monsieur S . . . expressing his astonishment at the first Statut des Juifs. ‘It’s quite absurd . . . It’s inconceivable! This is robbery’ Poor Monsieur S. It was much worse than that. They took everything we owned, they took away our jobs, and worst of all they took away out citizenship, our deeply valued position in society achieved with such difficulty over the past three-quarters of a century. And then, bending to German pressure, they took our freedom, and, finally, they took our lives.”

The “they” are not the Germans. It refers to the French, who cozied up to their invaders and betrayed
French Jewish citizens. People like the Mesnil-Amars had grown so confident in their Frenchness they had neglected their Jewish heritage. And we see what that has earned them.

The bitterness she expresses is directed at the Germans, the French, and at herself and those of her class for not paying enough attention to the despair of the refugee Jews in their midst: “Everyone must bear responsibility for their own country, for their own political regime, and just as we in France are responsible for our collective negligence and our defeat in 1940, and for much of what followed, similarly every German must take responsibility for a regime in which Buchenwald had been known about for years.”
Much to reflect upon here.

[Becky]

This book is the diary of Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, and upper-middle class resistance accomplice on the run in occupied Paris. It begins with the night that her husband, a resistance agent also of Jewish heritage, fails to return home. Wandering through Parisian cityscapes and listening to BBC reports, Amar recounts the history of Nazi Paris' final years. Rumors had just begun to circulate about the massacres occurring in the eastern camps, which were met with skepticism and dismissal.

Two themes stand out in the narrative. First, Amar reserves a particular vitriol for Nazi collaborators, the French who sold their Jewish and resistance neighbors out for money and cigarettes. More than simply being evil, these French betray their compatriots more subtly, through their apathy toward stories of atrocity and discrimination. Amar makes it very clear that silence is complicity.

Second, Amar meditates on childhood--her own, her daughter Sylvio's, and those of the children affected by war. A child of WWI, Amar has processed her traumas by the time she writes. Her reconciliation does nothing to help Sylvio, who knows when her mother is lying about her father's safety, or the child orphans and refugees who proliferated after the Liberation. Amar shows a graceful sensitivity for trauma recovery and hope.

In light of these two themes, I wish Persephone had kept the text's original title, with its clever double-meaning--Ceux qui ne dormaient pas, or Those Who Weren't Sleeping.

[Shirley (stampartiste)]

2017 Books and Chocolate Challenge: A Classic in Translation selection