Proust

Noomi Rapace as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The other night, Karen and I curled up on the couch and screened The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Swedish film based on the best selling novel.

A Hollywood version is in development and I have no doubt that the American movie will far surpass this dreary adaptation. There is so much exposition in the script—the book is even worse, it should have been chopped down to 120 pages—that after a few minutes I kind of drifted off and said to myself, “Okay, at least there’s nothing about Israel here and no Jews.”

But of course, the Jewish angle does appear.

I’m not going into detail, no spoilers here. But gee willikers, this obsession with Jews, with things Jewish, is nothing short of astonishing.

Note: the lead actress, Noomi Rapace, is brilliant, easily the best element in the film.

After the movie, I read my ten pages of In Search of Lost Time.

Yup, I’m at it again.

There are about four hundred and fifty characters in Proust’s immense novel. And out of that list, a good number of the major characters are Jewish or half-Jewish.

For example:

Charles Swann: an art connoisseur who is despised by the aristocratic class because he is Jewish. Swann is easily the most sympathetic character in the novel. Swann falls in love with the heartless courtesan Odette because she resembles Zipporah in the Boticelli painting “Jethro’s Daughters.” Of course, daughter Zipporah married Moses. Swann, like all the Jewish characters in the novel is in flight from his Jewishness, but Proust seems to be saying that the love of Swann’s life springs, in part, from the Torah embedded in his soul.

“Her loosened hair flowing down her cheeks, bending one knee in a slightly balletic pose . . . her head on one side, with those great eyes of hers which seemed so tired and sullen when there was nothing to animate her, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro’s daughter.” — Swann’s Way

Albert Bloch: the narrator’s oldest school friend. Proust has been accused of Jew-hatred for his portrayal of Bloch’s family as pushy, vulgar and ill-bred. But in fairness, Proust was, at best, conflicted about his Jewish roots and Bloch serves as Proust’s dark alter-ego.

Rachel: a notorious prostitute, avant garde actress, and greedy mistress to Marcel’s friend Saint-Loup. She is labeled “Rachel When From the Lord,” a reference to the Jewish matriarch Rachel, and more specifically to Halevy’s opera La Juive.

And of course, Proust details the tectonic rifts in French society caused by the Dreyfus Affair. Jew-hatred underlined the false charges against Captain Dreyfus. It was, in its own way, another European blood libel. Proust supported Captain Dreyfus and put himself at odds with his beloved French aristocracy.

Marcel Proust

Even in Proust’s famous long sentence from Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, of nine hundred and fifty-eight words, a sentence about homosexuality—a word Proust never uses, he prefers “inverts” which he defines as a woman trapped in a man’s body—makes reference to Jews:

“Their honor precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet one day feted in every drawing room and applauded in every theatre in London, and the next driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general misfortune when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied around Dreyfus, from the sympathy — at times from the society — of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates ever blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves…”

From Proust to Stieg Larsson, Jews figure prominently in their universe.

Currently, on the world stage, the obsession with Israel is just a stand-in for the age-old obsession with Jews.

And even Jews who have no connection to Torah Judaism, poisonous groups such as L.A. Jews for Peace, are obsessed with Israel. A negative obsession that perfectly mirrors the Dreyfus Jew-haters of Proust’s society.

In fact, these creatures are, to borrow a phrase from Proust: Inverts, Jew-haters trapped in Jewish bodies.

Why this obsession with Judaism/Israel/Jews?

The answer is quite simple.

Torah Judaism introduced the world to ethical monotheism, to the paradigm of good and evil, right and wrong, which guides Judeo-Christian values, and leaves little room for moral equivalence.

And the world will never forgive Jews and Judaism for this incomparable gift.

Reading Marcel Proust’s seven volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, 3,000 pages, and 1.5 million words, is a bit like jumping into an ocean—with no swimming skills. Nothing prepares the reader for the forbidding scale, the mind-bending syntax, the wide cast of characters, and the hypnotic sentences that curl back upon themselves with digressions folded into digressions.

There is a single sentence in Volume IV, Sodom and Gomorrah, that is made up of, I kid you not, 958 words. It is a grammatical beast.

Here’s how it begins:

“Their honor precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet one day feted in every drawing room and applauded in every theatre in London, and the next driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general misfortune when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied around Dreyfus, from the sympathy — at times from the society — of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates ever blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves…”

And yeah, I’m also totally out of breath because we have not even begun to get into the core of the sentence.

It takes a while to realize—I spent a year reading the book, ten pages a night—that the spine of the story is simplicity itself: Will the young protagonist, Marcel, become a good writer?

That’s it.

A letter written by Proust.

But within this theme Proust examines his society with a scientific and often cinematic attention to detail that is just breathtaking. The sections on the Dreyfus Affair are riveting. Proust—his mother was Jewish—was a supporter of the falsely accused Alfred Dreyfus. The passionate conversations in the aristocratic drawing rooms are a revealing mirror of the times.

Proust touches on almost every aspect of life, thus I was not surprised when a pair of women’s shoes turn up as a symbol of aristocratic indifference and cruelty.

In Volume III, The Guermantes Way, Charles Swann, an assimilated Jew, and one of the main characters of the novel, announces his impending death to the duc and duchesse de Guermantes.

“Very well, give me in one word the reason why you can’t come to Italy,” the Duchess put it to Swann as she rose to say good-bye to us.

“But, my dear friend, it’s because I shall then have been dead for several months. According to the doctors I consulted last winter, the thing I’ve got—which may, for that matter, carry me off at any moment—won’t in any case leave me more than three or four months to live, and even that is a generous estimate,” replied Swann with a smile, while the footman opened the glazed door of the hall to let the Duchess out.

Forgive the snip of a few paragraphs.

Mme. de Guermantes advanced resolutely towards the carriage and uttered a last farewell to Swann. “You know, we can talk about that another time; I don’t believe a word you’ve been saying, but we must discuss it quietly. I expect they gave you a dreadful fright, come to luncheon, whatever day you like” (with Mme. de Guermantes things always resolved themselves into luncheons), “you will let me know your day and time,” and, lifting her red skirt, she set her foot on the step. She was just getting into the carriage when, seeing this foot exposed, the Duke cried in a terrifying voice: “Oriane, what have you been thinking of, you wretch? You’ve kept on your black shoes! With a red dress! Go upstairs quick and put on red shoes, or rather,” he said to the footman, “tell the lady’s maid at once to bring down a pair of red shoes.”

“But, my dear,” replied the Duchess gently, annoyed to see that Swann, who was leaving the house with me but had stood back to allow the carriage to pass out in front of us, could hear, “since we are late.”

“No, no, we have plenty of time. It is only ten to; it won’t take us ten minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And, after all, what would it matter? If we turned up at half past eight they’d have to wait for us, but you can’t possibly go there in a red dress and black shoes. Besides, we shan’t be the last, I can tell you; the Sassenages are coming, and you know they never arrive before twenty to nine.”

The Duchess went up to her room.

The duchesse’s shoes do not match her dress. She takes the extra time to change them, time she was not willing to give to Swann. Fashion is far more important than Swann’s death.

“Well,” said M. de Guermantes to Swann and myself, “we poor, down-trodden husbands, people laugh at us, but we are of some use all the same. But for me, Oriane would have been going out to dinner in black shoes.”

“It’s not unbecoming,” said Swann, “I noticed the black shoes and they didn’t offend me in the least.”

Swann is not ruffled by the cold indifference to his illness. On the contrary, he politely comments on the color of the footwear. Charles Swann does not assert his humanity because as a Jew he relies on aristocratic good will; he is the court Jew whose very existence is predicated on the benevolence of the ruling class.

Proust, in one deft stroke, sketches the precarious and ultimately fatal position of the European Jew. Reading this scene, seething with subtext, I could not help but see it as a foreshadowing of the Holocaust where the lives of millions of Jews were meaningless to the cultured and well-educated Europeans.

This anti-Semitic chattering class is still with us, shrugging of the Islamization of Europe, and assuring us that the Iranians don’t really mean it when they announce, repeatedly and with fanatic religious devotion, that they intend to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

Speaking of pathological Jew-hatred, Anne Bayefsky exposes the lastest UN assault on Israel, and gee what a shock, the U.S. remains silent. Hope n’change, Obama style.

Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a peaceful and miraculous Shabbat.