Book Review | Parallels of character in the French, her father
After I graduated from college, I spent a year as a teaching assistant in a girls' high school in the north of France. Every day, I ate my lunch with the surveillantes, the young women who supervised the students after school hours. During my first week, these women chattered among themselves, pointedly ignoring me. At first, I felt hurt; then, angry; finally, I lashed out in my broken French, telling them how rude and inhospitable they were. No sooner did I speak up than they changed their behavior. They began to show an interest in me. In time, they invited me to their homes, where I ate some of the best food I ever had. They gave me tips on clothes, makeup, and decor, and taught me to love France.
An American's Encounter
with France, Her Father,
and the Holocaust
By Eunice Lipton
Carroll & Graf. 224 pp. $23.95
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Reviewed by Paula Marantz Cohen
After I graduated from college, I spent a year as a teaching assistant in a girls' high school in the north of France. Every day, I ate my lunch with the
surveillantes
, the young women who supervised the students after school hours. During my first week, these women chattered among themselves, pointedly ignoring me. At first, I felt hurt; then, angry; finally, I lashed out in my broken French, telling them how rude and inhospitable they were. No sooner did I speak up than they changed their behavior. They began to show an interest in me. In time, they invited me to their homes, where I ate some of the best food I ever had. They gave me tips on clothes, makeup, and decor, and taught me to love France.
This story is emblematic of the paradox Eunice Lipton sees as inherent in the French: They can be thoughtless and rude, but also susceptible to reason, as proper to a people who produced Voltaire. They can be cold and closed to outsiders, but also full of delightful knowledge about how to live.
Lipton's book explores the contradictions of French character and culture. She combines personal memoir with cultural critique and art history (she is trained as an art historian and has written several books on French art). French Seduction progresses by fits and starts, often circling back to the same topics, stubbornly trying to comprehend the infuriating but seductive nature of the French.
Lipton's love of France came to her through her father. He had fled Latvia in the 1920s to escape anti-Semitic persecution. Although he settled in the Bronx, France existed in his imagination as an aesthetic and intellectual ideal. "Darling, go to Paris. You'll be happy there," he counseled his daughter when she was still a child.
She did and lives there today, even as she is acutely aware that she remains an outsider, both as an American and, especially, as a Jew. As she writes about her complex feelings about the French, we see that the country duplicates aspects of her relationship with her father, who was charming and seductive, but also selfish, narrow-minded, and often cruel.
Lipton recalls how her first trip to Paris in 1960 was a revelation. Never had she seen so much beauty. My own first trip was similar. I was dazzled by the French women in their chicly knotted scarves and the French men in their supple leather shoes. I loved the tree-lined boulevards and the beautifully arranged apartments. And of course, there was the food: Even a simple tartine (a baguette spread with butter) was a culinary epiphany.
And the conversation: The French tease you with words. These can be a prelude to romance or simply an enticement to more talk. The ability to speak around a subject, to play with an idea, to revel in the give-and-take of opinion without needing to be right or prove the other wrong is a distinctively French gift. It can be found in the concierge and the taxi driver as much as in the university professor.
Perhaps the French enjoy conversation so much because they have the time for it. Their country facilitates leisure through a wide array of benefits: universal health care, day care for working mothers, long vacations, short work weeks. As Lipton notes, these services make France a very agreeable place to live.
But there is a serpent in the garden, as she points out again and again. The French are deeply committed to an idea of Frenchness that is profoundly exclusionary. Their collaboration with the Nazis during World War II is a taint on the national character, and the after-effects of the imperialist debacle of the Algerian War are still being felt.
But the French, quick to point a finger at others, have difficulty admitting the sins of their own history. Max Ophuls' film, The Sorrow and the Pity, which deals with the Collaboration, was banned when it first appeared in 1971. Michael Haneke's 2005 film, Caché, refers to a 1961 atrocity against Algerian immigrants that is rarely discussed in France.
Lipton sees France's failings as crippling its ability to move forward in the 21st century. "Their lying history is strangling them to death. They smooth everything over with good taste. At all costs, they sidestep conflict. Everything is neutralized. Nothing takes flight; nothing soars."
She notes that while Britain is thriving, open to innovative art and cuisine, embracing multiculturalism, doing brisk business on a variety of fronts, France has become reactionary and brittle, a culture and economy in decline. It is no coincidence, she says, that London was chosen over Paris as the site of the next Olympic Games.
I suspect Lipton wrote this book in part for therapeutic reasons - to dispel the sense of intimidation she feels as an outsider to her beloved France. But I also think she wants to tell the French (as she was not able to tell her father) what they have done to offend her. Perhaps she feels that speaking up will change things. Or that, at the least, someone will invite her for dinner and a good conversation.
