South Central Review

David Caron’s My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community is a disastrous book. Let me be clear: this brilliant, insightful, and moving study of the author’s relationship with his father and the Parisian neighborhood where their Queer and Jewish identities intersect is built on Caron’s argument that disaster can be the foundation of community. With a compelling combination of personal memoir, urban history, literary analysis, and critical theory, Caron examines how the Marais neighborhood in Paris’s fourth arrondissement is haunted by the dual disasters of the Holocaust and AIDS that, in the wake of overwhelming devastation, inspired new forms of association and connection among both survivors and those that followed. Opening with the admission that “My relationship with my father was a disaster” (1), Caron simultaneously considers the disastrous histories of Queers and Jews in the Marais, where the Jewish rue des Rosiers and Queer rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie connect along the rue Vieille du Temple at the corner where, as Caron writes, “Jewish memory . . . meets a gay bar called Amnesia” (8).

Born in Hungary in 1919, David Caron’s father Joseph Gottlieb emigrated to France in 1937. At the beginning of the Second World War, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion, was captured, and spent the rest of the war as a French POW. Most of Mr. Gottlieb’s family back in Hungary was (like Elie Wiesel and his own family) deported to Auschwitz, including his parents, siblings, and many nieces and nephews, who all perished in the camps. Although he later fought in Israel’s War of Independence (1948–49) and lived in an Israeli kibbutz (1953–56), Joseph Gottlieb repeatedly returned to France, just as he had done following the Second World War, when he lived and worked in the Marais. Revisiting this neighborhood with his father in 2002, amid its mix of gay bars and Jewish restaurants, Caron wonders, “[H]ad he been in my neighborhood, or I in his?” (7), and thus initiates a detailed investigation into the history of the Marais’s Jewish and Queer communities.

From an ancient marshland on the right banks of the Seine, to the home of sixteenth-century royalty and seventeenth-century aristocracy, the Marais evolved into the Jewish and later gay “ghettos” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that endure today alongside gentrified buildings and bourgeois boutiques, and a new influx of immigrants from China. While Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim have lived and worked in the Pletzl since at least the fourteenth century, North-African Sephardim (im)migrated to the Quartier Saint Paul following the decolonization of the Maghreb in the 1950s and 60s, and were later joined by Israeli immigrants in the 1980s. Even as other Jews settled in [End Page 124] Parisian suburbs like Sarcelles and Créteil, the inner-city Marais retained its Jewish identity, with active synagogues on the rue Pavé and rue des Tournelles (designed by Gustave Eiffel in 1876 and Hector Guimard in 1913), as well as falafel restaurants, kosher delis, and both the Musée d’art d’histoire du Judaïsme and the Mémorial de la Shoah.

Caron concomitantly traces the history of the Queer Marais, from its first gay bars in the 1970s and flourishing gay nightlife of the 1980s to the immense growth of Gay Pride during the 1990s and 2000s. Yet, amid such celebrations of Jewish and Queer cultures in this urban neighborhood where “A Lubavitch in a long black coat walking by a group of tank-topped queens isn’t an unusual sight” (63), Caron focuses on the dual disasters of the Holocaust and AIDS. From his relationship with his father to the broader histories of anti-Semitism and homophobia in France, Caron articulates the importance of what he calls “disastrous realization: the realization of community through disaster” (159). Theorizing that “there is no community without disaster” (10), Caron examines the literary testimony of the Holocaust (from Charlotte Delbo to Robert Antelme) and the AIDS crisis (from Guillaume Dustan to Hervé Guibert) in order to illustrate how “community and disaster realize each other simultaneously” (153).

Following this painful realization, Caron then investigates the legacy of AIDS and the Holocaust in the more recent debates in France on identity politics and republican citizenship. This tension between the American model of communautarisme and the French model of universalisme has, for the past three decades in France, been at the center of controversies over gay civil unions, marriage, and adoption as well as debates on immigrant rights and freedom of expression, such as the wearing of the Muslim hijab in public schools and the frequent violent clashes between police and youth of African descent. In his analysis of the gay Marais—a place, he reminds us, where Queers consume and socialize rather than live—Caron is critical of capitalist and assimilationist shifts in Queer culture, the privileging of young white middle-class gay men over Queer women and people of color (among others), and the mainstreaming gentrification and homogeneity of the Marais and other Queer ghettos, such as the Castro, WeHo, Chelsea, and the West Village. Amid diverse discussions on the erotics of barebacking, cruising, and public sex, perhaps most compelling is Caron’s nuanced consideration of internalized and externalized homophobia, and his criticism of those who vehemently and un-self-reflectively hate “self-hating homosexuals,” from Roman Catholic priests, gay Republicans, and Down Low African-Americans, to Roy Cohn, Mohammed Atta, and even Adolf Hitler.

So compelling is Caron’s examination of those places where Queer and Jewish identities meet that I am curious to know even more about what he might say and theorize about those who embody both of these identities (that is, Queer Jews) and the ways many Queer Jewish scholars and activists have either embraced or resisted the metaphorization of AIDS as “holocaust.” While Caron expertly examines Holocaust tropes in French AIDS memoirs, I would love to hear his thoughts on Susan Sontag’s AIDS and its Metaphors (1989), [End Page 125] Larry Kramer’s Reports from the Holocaust (1989), and Kramer’s more recent Tragedy of Today’s Gays (2004–05). After his insightful discussion of Queer Jewish writers (from Proust, to Tony Kushner, to himself), I’m curious to know what Caron thinks of observant Queer Jews, from the rabbinical mavericks in Rebecca Alpert et al.’s Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation (2001), to the orthodox Queer Hassidim in Sandi Dubowski’s Trembling before G*d (2001). Such American texts, films, and figures are not—and certainly need not be—the focus of David Caron’s already detailed, expansive, and ground-breaking book. But in his role as one of America’s leading French scholars of both Queer and Jewish identities, Caron will undoubtedly be in great demand to offer his further thoughts on these (among many other) places where French and American Queers and Jews intersect.

If, as he argues, “Disaster . . . is the origin of all communities” (159), then Caron’s My Father and I is a productively “disastrous” and valuable contribution to our communal understanding of memory and loss, disaster and failure, pride and shame, self-hatred and survival, paternal love and fraternal friendship. Caron’s thoughtful historical analysis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is punctuated by a keen twenty-first century sensibility, from his discussion of youtube and amazon.com, to digital photography and post-9/11 postmodernity. And amid his moving personal stories and compelling critical theory, Caron’s writing is marked by sharp wit and humor on falafel and sex, hairdos and the hora, bourgeois bad taste and cabaret camp. Like the family photos that frame this engaging volume—from those of his father’s family before their deportation in cattle-cars to Auschwitz, to those he took of his father departing by train in the Gare St. Lazare before Mr. Gottlieb’s death in 2004—David Caron’s My Father and I offers powerful snapshots of the collective spaces of Queer and Jewish Paris, the dual disasters of AIDS and the Holocaust, and their legacy among Queers and Jews in contemporary France.