Vol. 66 No. 4 1999 - page 559

MICHAL GOVRIN
559
enough to the seductive-dangerous realm. My complicated relations with
that boy paralleled the shock of discovery of Ka£ka; and along with the
tempest of feelings of fifteen-year-olds, that forbidden, denied, inflamed
relation
also
had a pungent nuxture of
eros
and sadism, a tenderness and an
attraction to death, and above all, metaphysical dimensions that pierced the
abyss of dark feelings which somehow was
also
part of "there."
In
my childhood, when Mother was an omnipotent entity within the
house,
r
couldn't "understand" her. Later, when she became the authority
to rebel against, the enzyme necessary to cut the fruit off from the branch
erected a dam of alienation and ennuty between us; I couldn't identifY with
her, with her humanity. There had to be a real separation. I had to live by
myself. To go through the trials alone. To listen slowly to what was concealed.
(An amazing example of the layers of memory and forgetting was
revealed to me as I wrote
The Name.
The only detail I borrowed in the
novel from things I had heard from Mother was a story of the heroism of
a woman who succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and when
she was caught and taken to the Appelplatz, she managed to commit sui–
cide. I also borrowed the admiring tone in which Mother spoke of the
event. (Only later did I discover how it had served her as a model.) I cre–
ated a biographical-fictional character, a virtuoso pianist, and invented a
name for her-Mala-immortalized in the name of the heroine, Amalia.
Years later, as I was finishing the book, I came across a written description
of the event in Birkenau and discovered that the name of the woman was
the same as the name I had "invented," "Mala"-Mala Zimetbaum.)
Then came the move to Europe, to Paris. To study for the doctorate and
to write literature intensively. I went to the Paris of culture, of Rilke, of
Proust, of Edith Piaf. But in '72, soon after I arrived, the film The
Sorrow and
the Pity
by Marcel Ophuls was released. When the screelung ended in the
cinema on the Champs-Elysees, I emerged into a different Paris, into a place
where that mythical war had gone on. "I understood" that here, on Rue de
Rivoli, beneath my garret room, German tanks had passed (ever since then
they began to inhabit my dreams); "I understood" that the description of the
French as a nation of bold underground fighters and rescuers of Jews-a
notion I had grown up wi th in the years of the n1ili tary pact between Israel
and de Gaulle's France-was very far from reality. The clear, comforting
borders between good and bad were shattered for me, and so were the simple
moral judgments mobilized for ideologies. Here, far from a post-Six-Day
War Israel secure in her power, far from the official versions of Holocaust
and heroism, a different time was in the streets, a time not completely cut
off from the war years. Here, for the first time I experienced the sense of
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