33 1 3 087 Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson Darran Anderson (pdf)

Archiwum

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

artist, painter of postcards and architect of imaginary
cities, on 22 June. Hitler toured the near-deserted city
visiting the Opera House, the Eiffel Tower, the tomb of
Napoleon. The first newspaper seller who recognized
me stood there and gaped , he later recounted. I still
have before me the mental picture of that woman & who
saw me from her window and exclaimed, The Devil .
In a casual aside to his architect Albert Speer, he advised
he would not obliterate Paris after all. He had other
plans for it.
Gainsbourg s parents had come to Paris originally as
refugees from state terror in Russia. They had grown
up during the Tsarist regime in the vast ghetto known
as the Pale of Settlement where Jews were begrudg-
ingly permitted, subject to regular ritual pogroms.
These were the days of the dreaded Black Hundreds
when Nationalists, Monarchists and Orthodox forces
unleashed waves of violence upon their Jewish neighbours
" 57 "
HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
in Białystok, Lwow and Kiev. Fabrications such as the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, accusations of Blood Libels,
the poisoning of wells and the child sacrifice of Gentiles
were forged by theologists and the secret police, and used
to justify the murder of entire families. Thousands were
massacred. Among those who escaped in the chaos of
revolution in 1917, with civil war breaking out between
the insurgent Bolsheviks and their anti-Semitic white
Russian opponents, were the young Jewish couple from
Kharkov in the Ukraine, both in their early twenties
Joseph Ginsburg and Olia Besman. They had met when
the classically trained Ginsburg came to teach piano
to Besman, a mezzo-soprano singer, and her siblings.
Having fallen in love, the couple found their fledgling
romance interrupted by the fall of an empire and, having
narrowly escaped being killed on several occasions,
they decided to elope, following Besman s brother via
an epic arc around a war-devastated Europe, south to
Georgia, by ship across the Black Sea to Constantinople
and the Mediterranean, eventually making landfall at
Marseilles before finally stopping in Paris. They settled
in the working-, and drinking, class area M�nilmontant,
near P�re-Lachaise cemetery where Ginsburg s hero
the composer and pianist Fr�d�ric Chopin was buried.
Recognizing perhaps the anti-Semitism bubbling under
the civil surface of Parisian society since the Dreyfus
affair, Ginsburg chose to break with faith and tradition
and assimilate his family into their new found home as
natives. From now on, they were French.
Although they had gained a foothold, life was hard
for the Ginsburgs. Their first-born son Marcel died of
bronchitis as a toddler. Following the birth of her daughter
" 58 "
DA R R A N A NDE R S ON
Jacqueline, Olia fell pregnant again and on 2 April 1928,
in H�tel-Dieu de Paris hospital gave birth to the twins
Liliane and Lucien. Initially they struggled, with Joseph
playing ragtime, jazz and cabaret songs in bars at night,
eventually fronting a group Les Blue Stars. However, the
family moved to Montmartre, and things seemed to be
improving. The nightmare of history, though, which they
had momentarily outrun, would soon catch up with them.
The process of first alienating then butchering an
entire race of people was an incremental one for the
Nazis and their collaborators. Initially, the occupying
German forces were ordered to be well behaved, at
least in comparison to their comrades raping and killing
their way towards Stalingrad. All Jews in the city were
required to register their names and addresses at a local
police station during the autumn of 1940. Paradoxically,
the very humanity and civility of these people assisted
their destruction. They would reassure themselves that
it was just a formality, a census. Once identified, they
were gradually excluded from public life: first from the
army then the press, education, business, healthcare.
Their businesses and property were stolen, or rather
Aryanized . They were accused of irrationally contra-
dictory conspiracy theories, of operating the levers of
capitalism whilst sponsoring Bolshevism, of both being
subhumans and having superhuman powers of control
and deceit. They were accused of controlling France
at a time when the swastika flew above the Arc de
Triomphe. Posters began to appear with Stars of David
superimposed over the nation. Bearded rabbinical figures
enshrouding the world with their robes, claw-like hands
reaching for the country. Even then, the civility and
" 59 "
HI S TOI RE DE MELODY NELS ON
decency of the Jewish population reassured them. They
were French. They were Parisians. This was their home.
Some could trace their ancestry and presence in the
country back to Roman times. It had been their terrible
misfortune to have projected upon them all manner of
Gentile neurosis, jealousy and superstition. They had
even been the focus of mental illness which in a sense
acts as a cracked mirror to the zeitgeist. In the Middle
Ages, the paranoid and the delusional feared and raged
against witches, devils and Jews. In the modern age, it
might be radiowaves, the FBI and Jews. The conspirato-
rially inclined, whether mad or bad, were consistent. In
France, there had been periods of official persecution,
crippling taxes enacted by the Church and periodic
witch hunts but those days had seemed to pass into
history. Things had changed even since the days when
Emile Zola had heroically cried J accuse during the
travesty of justice against Dreyfus. Sarah Bernhardt,
Emile Durkheim and Marcel Proust were Jews. Even the
Prime Minister of the country L�on Blum had been a
Jew. As the writer and Resistance member Albert Camus
had written of humanity they wanted to cling, but there
was nothing to cling to .
When Jewish people were banned from working
and appearing freely in public, it became clear to even
the most optimistic that all they were free to do was [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

himalia.xlx.pl