Author Talk | Edmund de Waal and Adam Gopnik in Conversation

hello everyone my name is jenna weiss and i'm the manager of public programs at the jewish museum it's my pleasure to welcome you to this conversation featuring writers edmontoval and adam gopnik to celebrate the launch of duvall's latest book letters to commando we would like to thank the rita j and stanley h kaplan foundation whose generous endowment support makes the saul and gladys schwartzman lecture possible each year now i would like to introduce our speakers edmund de vall is an artist who has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world his best-selling memoir the hair with amber eyes has won numerous prizes been translated into 29 languages and will be the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the jewish museum later this year his previous work the white road a journey into the history of porcelain was published in 2015. adam gopnik has been writing for the new yorker since 1986. he is the recipient of three national magazine awards both for essays and for criticism and also of the george polk award for magazine reporting in march of 2013 gottmack was awarded the medal of chevalier of the order of arts and letters by the french republic it is my pleasure to welcome them to present this conversation so i've written another book it's called letters to come on though and we start in the rudim also in the 8th arrondissement of paris which is probably where we all want to be and it's on this particular extraordinary hill of golden houses all built in the 1860s and 1870s on the edge of this very beautiful park all built including this wonderful house by people and families who've come from all over europe to settle in the most civilized glorious city in europe in paris and on this city of extraordinary people is my family the fussy family that came from odessa and lived in the ludum also and then ten houses down is this house the museum is the jewish family that has come from constantinople but bankers like my own family who arrive in exactly the same year 1869 and build themselves an extraordinary house and this is where we start you walk down this street you come to these great gates you walk across this great courtyard and you find yourself in a fantasy almost like the petty triangle a beautiful golden poised house you walk slightly to the left across the crunching gravel you open this door and there's this extraordinary staircase gilded staircase you could be in the frick you walk up the staircase or you turn left and left again to the escalier descents and you find this metal staircase going up into the fifth floor into the attics into the all the old servants quarters and that's where you need to go this is where i've been spending my time up on the top floor of the musee they seem to come under and it's here in these deserted rooms um some of them completely empty some of them just with traces of the furniture left behind by the servants you open one cupboard and it's full of trunks from louis vuitton another full of broken light fittings from the 1920s then you open another door and you find you're in the archives they are absolutely astonishing archives they are hunting records and banking records and wills with coda sills records of acquisitions from the man who lived here that can't moisture come on though you find letters to everyone everything's stamped with received and the date you find extraordinary details you find letters from proost and here in these archives you begin to test what it is that's going on why did this man keep every single scrap of paper why so much information in these penumbras rooms on the top of this extraordinary house this is a family that comes from constantinople here is the come on those steps in istanbul this is the first house they built in that extraordinary street it is a monstrosity says zola it's got a bastard eclecticism he says rudely everyone is rude about these jewish families on this house and when you see the pictures of the interiors which moyes grew up in here is a photograph of the house you see why it's eclecticism taken to its um dangerous degree and this is the house that suddenly makes me realize i know what we're talking about this is so similar to the house of my own assimilated jewish family on the ringstrasse in vienna this is eclecticism gone wild and this is the house that he grows up in and when his parents have died he does what any good jewish child should do he pulls the house down he sells off every single stick of furniture in the house um i have the sale catalogs here from from from where he atama anatomizes every single object everything ottoman goes into the sale rules and this young man here he is with this raffish black eye from a hunting accident the man who loves speed he loves motor cars he loves racing he he loves the good things in life decides to get rid of that inheritance to make himself more purely parisian in this assimilated street and what he does is of course to marry the proper jewish girl from the neighboring clan become don there and here she is the young irene painted by renoir commissioned curated and arranged by my cousin charles frisie who lives a few doors alone and he marries this young woman they have two children beatrice and anisim and then she runs off with the hunting with the stable master gentile the end of the marriage and they have another jingle so there is moise here he is with his children he builds himself a house he builds himself this extraordinary house on the edge of the apartment and when you go into this house and you see the staircases and you feel these extraordinary moments where he's trying to create a house in which the most pure and uncivilized furniture and furnishings and tapestries uh of the 18th century are brought together you understand what he's doing he's saying that he wants to build a house which talks to that moment in french society 1791 when jews are given citizenship the first country in europe that gives full citizenship for the jews he wants to make a house which will be full of conversation where voltaire can walk through the door and he does that with great panache you walk round this house you see the furniture and the fittings and you understand exactly what he's doing in these rooms he's making a particular house for a particular moment here is his extraordinary library and what he's doing is is to create a sense a space where um his parisians this identity can be held up against the mirror of anti-semitism the street is full of noise um every time he opens the papers it's full of drewmore the anti-semitic leader of the press um excavating him for not belonging for being vile for being vermin for not being pure for not being french for speaking with the wrong accent and here in this house with these beautiful rooms and with these extraordinary servants quarters which are filtered all the way through the house in these extraordinary rooms where he can produce these meals where he can invite uh the grata he can invite all these different people to sit around his table this is where he brings up his beautiful two children museem who of course joins the french army on the first day he can during the great war here he is on leave with beatrice and here is niseem sitting on leave with his devoted father in the back garden of of the house in kamunda and what happens nissim is killed naseem is killed in 1917 his plane goes down uh over the german front and moise is taken apart this is the house he built for his son it becomes a memorial overnight he becomes a person of grieving and mourning he turns his son's rooms into memorial rooms he withdraws into these spaces here is his table in a porcelain room that he creates so he can be alone and he decides that this house he's putting together it's going to become a memorial which he will give to france in honor of his father and his son museum he seemed to come under and his daughter beatrice marries another good jewish boy he's my grandmother's cousin leon reineck a young composer he's the sign of this extraordinary father theodore reinache and the nephrite uh they are great intellectuals they've built on the on the banks of of the mediterranean this extraordinary villa vera keralos a fantasy of greek living and here this young family grow up before they take themselves off to live next to the bodybuilding in more comfortable circumstances leaving moise and this is the house he lives in and this is the house he dies in this beautiful beautiful house and then 1935 he gives it to france in his will and there's a great ceremony in that beautiful courtyard you see on the gravel when the house is given to france beatrice has given over a inheritance uh in gratitude everyone is grateful for being perusing and it's a great success the press is full of this gift and the opening hours are extended in that same year this beautiful house belonging to leon's father keralas has also given over to france more gratitude and you know what happens next and you know that in 1940 that paris is declared a free city and the next day that the wehrmacht walks in and leon and beatrice are living in their beautiful apartment on the edge of the bois the bologna with their children two children fanny who rides like her mother and a son who wants to be a cabinet maker and slowly but surely day by day there is that slow and then faster and faster taking a part of the identity the rights the freedoms of every single jewish citizen in paris in vichy france the laws the edicts where you can sit where you must get your yellow star the roundups the slow and then the faster taking a part of objects possessions the looting of your identity the great portrait is taken from them and then they are rounded up and taken to drasie that concentration camp on the edge of paris guarded by french guards and you look at these cards you think about those archives this is where paper takes on a different identity and here is beatrice and you see those last lines par aa4j which means that you are completely jewish do not liberate do not let go rynak crossed out the kamundo and you see this for fanny the girl who loves to be on horseback and you see here the sun and the grandson bertrand here is the picture and on the 20th of november 1943 on convoy 62 leon the composer bertrand who wanted to become an evanest who wanted to lay down lacquers and different kinds of wood into furniture and fanny are deported to auschwitz and on the 7th of march 1944 beatrice on convoy 69 is deported to auschwitz and they are murdered and the house which was to be a memorial for a son lost in the first war becomes this extraordinary strange powerful memorial for the whole of the family and so i write letters and i write letters to moise about belonging who owns your belonging i write to him about assimilation what it is to cross a border and become [Music] a citizen of a new country and know that you belong i write to him about morning about what it is to collect objects and try and hold them together about diaspora what it is to surround yourself with the collection of a place and objects i write to them about being jewish and i write to them about our families because these are my cousins this is a house that my grandmother knew from visiting her cousins and i write to him about food he loved food and i write him about chardonn because he loves shada and about objects and about silence because i write to him letters to kamundu and of course there is silence as he does not write back and that is my new book letters to him about belonging and adam my good dear long lasting friend you're here i am conversation to take me and i don't know where we're gonna go adam but i'm you are a man who knows paris unlike anyone else so here you are hello it's such a pleasure to be back with you again edmund and to celebrate this extraordinary book which i have here in the in the french edition as i was teasing you before when i read it in french i was convinced that my friend edmond could do anything including writing really you know i have it in the language but i wanted to talk about so many things you've laid out the content of the book and the structure of it so so um eloquently um obviously in one way it's a book about a story that we we know and we've heard uh we've heard told in in in many varieties no matter how many times we hear it told it never ceases to have the power to break our hearts the last play i saw before the pandemic struck and imprisoned us for the past 14 months was tom stoppard's leopold shot which is a a parallel work of art in a book in in so many ways a story of uh assimilation and tragedy and uh the two things i wanted to start with was first to say to our listeners that this is not um though a book with a tragic subject obviously not a lagubrious book it's full of all of your wonderful writing about chardan wonderful pages in chardan beautiful pages on objects full of the delectation that we uh come to edmund duvall for wonderful pages on dust um that was some of my favorite pure writing in the book just about the appeal of dust and why dust is not a bad thing this wonderful thing by uh commando where he talks about keeping uh vacuum cleaners away from the ambiguity of the vacuum cleaner which is both desirable and not and you talk so beautifully here edmund about um just one small thought it landed on us i'm not much of a one for um um the untranslatability of languages but it did occur to me the pusier the french word for dust is so unlike dust exactly that it it elevates dust shakespearean dust into another place um so i would hate for anyone to think that this is uh that this book makes for um it certainly has a melancholic effect no tragic effect but it is not melancholic reading it's full of uh the vigor and life that you bring to everything but it did seem to me edmund um that it once again comes to your central thematic preoccupation and that is for lack of a better um way of putting it the pride and pathos of objects because the thing that's so heartbreaking deeply heartbreaking is not just the story of of uh betrayal and and uh deportation and all it's that the degree to which the whole commando family invested in objects as a kind of alternative to not an alternative reality but as an alternative reality in itself and that um that the objects would somehow guarantee or assure your position for collecting beautiful things would do that and of course it ends up being a pathetic hope not just because of the catastrophe of the holocaust of course but just because of the catastrophe of mortality even if this not happened nissan the house is built for nissan and nissan dies in the war um it seems to me that infuses everything you write and everything you make i have one theme you've got me adam you've absolutely got me i mean it's it you know my epigraph is lacro my rare the tears of things you know and it is absolutely what i keep coming back to which is you know that that um that in objects the objects that that we choose to surround ourselves or the objects that we try and pass on to others um we are profoundly invested they tell extraordinary um complicated and fissile stories about who we are about identity and and so here is moise de camundo and i'm glad you say it's not a a lacrimal story because here is someone who loves he loves wine he loves hunting he loves being out and he but he loves objects and he loves that particular moment in french culture um where where everything talks to everything else where you can have a beautiful carpet on the floor and you can have extraordinary furniture and that nothing is quite what it seems all the materials are are veneered all the materials are talking in a very cadence way to each other so to surround yourself with those particular objects that particular moment you know you're saying something so beautiful and lyrical about who you are um i am french i am a french person of this particular moment but you're also saying um i am able to create a world and and i can pass it on i ca i can do this you know he's you and and so um what you've got is is is an extraordinary um um extraordinary sense of the fragility of of what you can pass on yes it's if your work has one theme it's the pathos of possession yes we believe that if we could possess enough we can somehow turn back the waves of mortality and tragedy and it turns out inevitably in this case through the intervention of a a world-scale catastrophe but inevitably in any case possession will turn to pathos sooner or later i i not to not to make the subject too journalistic but i i want something that was very much on my mind and thinking about the stoppard play which for anyone who hasn't yet had it i will interject and say that i had a wonderful conversation with tom uh on sunday oh my goodness which was absolutely terrifying um i had no idea what the substance of it was what one of the things that that occurred to me though as an american canadian jew with all of the perhaps um too uh easy assimilation of the kind but as someone who's lived in france for many years and written about that experience with in another way it struck me um let me see if i can put this well in reading your book once again that the to compare french jews and british jews or the experience of the french and british jews i just did a piece about lucy and freud not so long ago and one of the things that's striking about the freud's is first of all they get out in time which is one of the tragedies of the 30s you keep when one's reading a book like this you want to say pack up and go just pack up and go um but also that there's a and and this is something you can speak about with expertise and i can speak about only as an outsider there's a sense that um british jews on the one hand had a much uh easier time there's no history of there's no edmund drummond in in in england there's chesterton and bellock and so on but they are of a less uh obviously poisonous and toxic kind and german i should i mentioned german because he plays a large role in this in the book the leading um uh ideological anti-semite of the of the time of the dreyfus affair um at the same time there's something about the jewish love of french culture that seems to me uh far more as you documented here far more energetic far more passionate in its appetite to be french whereas it seems to me reading about freud reading your own work thinking about stoppard that uh the british jews sit at the edge of the culture in a slightly more some way that's simultaneously more less threatened and um less um uh less passionately attached is there is there anything any truth in that lots of truth so let's take it apart because there is there is an extraordinarily powerful um identification that goes on um in particular in this in this i'm talking about here in the comment box um which says actually um france is the new homeland for jews you know you know this um not only uh has as napoleon given us um um citizenship and it's very interesting to be given citizenship very powerful conversation how about that um but actually um but but of course um it means that the the jewish population is is is part of a whole series of different and diverse no one owns the whole existence any particular element of citizenship within france we all own it and so there is that extraordinary intellectual understanding of where jewish culture might might have come to help come come home in france um i and i you know i speaking as someone who's you know with a with all the complexities of a of a refugee dad who came here in 39 and um and didn't ever really talk about being jewish but just had a very strong accident you know the englishness bit is very mixed up here because um uh uh my father's generation um who the ones who escaped and managed to get here um became more english than the english they really did you know they really powerfully did and i don't think they felt particularly um called out on their jewishness at all yeah you know i'm you know they really didn't as you say there was no drew moore driving public anti-semitism um on the streets of london yes and that comes that's very thematic um in in stoppard's play it's not that he carries jewishness around as a deep guilt he doesn't know he's carrying jewishness until his brother until someone makes him realize it yes yes indeed and i and um um and you know he he stopped talks himself as being a lucky you know being lucky the whole time you know you know and then and then in in leopold you know he he really examines he really examines he talks about the shadows right at the end of the play talks about the shadows of history and where they lie and you really do feel that he's he's he's looking back over a very very long career and going how come i didn't i didn't work this out you know how come this is happening this play is happening when i'm 82. yes exactly and and it did strike me too that the the end of the play in which this is simply kind of like a uh death knell tolling the word auschwitz occurs again and again realizes the stoppard character realizes what's happened to this delightful assimilated family that play begins with a christmas tree with the star of david on top of it uh have been sent there and it put me very much in mind of the power of those simple uh uh fish that you reproduce here that you know 4j meaning you know cathedral jay meaning the true jew jew on all sides um do not liberate do not do not release and it made me think um as well that something that's beautiful in this book is that um the french and and french jewish obsession with the archive one of the things that's um uh beautiful in this book is that you find those extraordinary archives of the collection in those um uh cedar closets uh in in one room and they have this strange uh chiming symmetry with that what i called once the parallel paper universe in france right where everything can be deferred to a bureaucratic um ledger and this is what happens the family so we can barely understand that the significance of those fish is that their death sentences their death sentences are the most of of the most horrible kind um and one of the things that that's thematic for you in the book i think is the power of the archive and your fascination with the archive tell if you would um edmund both about where you went how you did it where did you find those species and how you feel about the archival imagination i so so i mean i kind of i kind of think you know i i make pots i write books but i think probably i'm just an archivist you know you know that's probably kind of you know that's that and and certainly over you know the years and years adam as you know when i was writing the hair without brides about my you know first book you know i really was just in archives the whole time and and finding but but both finding things you know particular things in bits of in synagogue like archives but also in in libraries but but but but then finding all the lacuna all the spaces where you sh there should be information and there isn't so finding all the spaces where you would expect a need to find information um and and powerfully hope to find information and you just find silence so archives are are really fascinating because they they talk profoundly to power who own you know who's looking after it who put things or who puts things away and who destroys um those histories who who who are faces are raises them um and so i i guess when i'm in those archives and they can be up in the servants quarters in the commando or other parisian archives you know um um i'm i'm conscious there um of how much has survived um but i'm also you know there are none of beatrice's letters there you know where have they gone you know this whole correspondence between um and you know there are there are elements of the com of the these terrible letters where they're sort of pleading um to have some of their objects back during 1944 saying 43 saying you know we've given so much to advance you you will remember how much we've given to france and when you see those letters you know you're you're you're conscious that that this is only half the correspondence so all the time all the time you're weighing up the absences alongside what you can discover and then and then you and then you then you have to write it adam you really have to write it down yes but one has a beautiful sense of your self as an as an as an explorer one of the things that was again i i use the word heartbreaking too frequently but is the is those desperately pleading letters from the during the war and then the the responses that they never saw basically saying that they're jews don't you don't have to do anything and that the even the head of the altitude de france never really went to bat the people they thought would go to bat for them as we would say never really did in the in the french state um uh it occurs to me too though one of the things that fascinates me is that the letter from proust that you yes that you discovered is we both are obviously um fanatic pristines i just did a long piece about bruce and it speaks well for proust's extraordinary tact and sensitivity that he writes a beautiful letter to moise about when nisam disappears saying he may show up uh san essentia yet even though he certainly knew that he wouldn't um and it made me think about the the the kind of the compact if you like of those wealthy assimilated jewish families who lived along uh the room also proof's not literally living there but living not very far not not living very far off in various in various places talk a bit if you would um edmund about that community and its particular kind of um uh style aesthetic well i mean for a start it's a very it's an extraordinary community because it happens very quickly so it's you know within a decade or two decades there are all these families coming from the levant or from or from odessa or wherever um they choose apartick and ashkenazi the the family absolutely absolutely and um you know and um and it's as you know that particular area of france is you know it's an it's an opportunity to build yourself a big house basically you know it's a new area and so you can do it with a certain alarm and you can you can really build build big um but what you have is this um uh um it's it's absolutely intertwined um um commerce i mean lots of money but but also hugely intellectual just to stop you in a second because it just where did the commando money come from oh constantinople banking banking banking income yes banking and byzantium um you know um but but very very rapidly i mean um you know this is second generation arrival um they are not only buying strawberry art but but but running archaeological departments or or or owning and writing the gazette de bozar you know or um or commissioning proof to do all your family portraits and then there's bruce so you know so what you have very very quickly is of course samoan culture which is something you've written beautifully about um so which is in some ways the the performance of culture in in you know um in in these streets um um and my god what a performance it is but but it touches music it touches um it's no surprise to find that that lay up my grandmother's cousin leon is a is a not very good composer you know really that's kind of perfect sort of you know sam fact of course he's a composer um um and and and then and then they all marry i mean you know as i sort of slightly riley point out adam in the book you know i mean everyone's a bloody cuff you know you know for you you know you know everyone turns out and i think i say i know far too much of who slept with who in 1900 you know you know too much information so that that's how it works this is uh um this great and of course there's that and then as as you as you point out the other side of that is all these families are brought together by this anti-semitic press all the time they're always listed together and uh and excoriated together as those who will never be truly french who are pretending to be french only in order to benefit the jews only in order to benefit each other and they'll be up and gone the first time they can have it although it's a curious thing and it comes and it's it's it comes up in the book certainly comes up in the life of proofs that there was a way for french jews you know someone like theodore herzl saw the dreyfus case as proof positive that there was no place for the jews in europe that they would never be safe and but there was another way of reading it which was the french state had ultimately come through it was a long and torturous uh process but finally dreyfus had been vindicated the laws of this city had been passed and you could read it as uh an affirmation after after a long struggle and that's clearly very much the way they chose to re the all of those families chose to read it and you would have thought that i mean for god's sake in 1935 you know there is come on again you know he dies he gives his house across and all the other cousins have given their houses to france because they're great and you know the minister of education uh and and um culture jewish you know the prime minister was jewish you know first promised leon bloom right yeah exactly you know and so you know why in 1935 would you think that you would want to leave france why would you want to leave france um and then in 1940 why would you want to leave france you know actually but then you know within three weeks you know the first edits are from from vichy france from peta from you know who you've been seeing at bloody cocktail parties dinners for the last 20 years so you know that sense of betrayal of of of an idea of who belongs in france is so profound you know and you know when i was writing about the angelus that's one thing because you kind of knew in in here with amber eyes you know that's right in the hair without bites because you knew that vienna was shot through with anti-semitism to enzo's fingertips you know but paris you know paris sending sending french policemen um to to round up jews in the velodrome and paris you know um um looting sister when i was in paris it was unimaginable for them i was writing a long piece which i intend to turn into a little kind of duval wannabe book someday called the ghost of the glass house about the um the charo house um subject of a wonderful exhibition at the uh at the jewish museum here in new york um the death sauce family the family of wealthy jews who owned it when the before the roundups when they were asked to register as jews by in paris when often did it because they literally could not conceptualize betrayal on the part of the french state they it was simply outside the range of their experience as in ways that it might well be for jews in new york you simply cannot imagine that you would have be surrounded by enmity yeah and they and they um and they would do that you know it it's adam i've got to ask you this because you've lived in paris much you know far longer than me so you know the the the light the post-war reckoning in my sense has never happened never tell me about i mean because you know you know there are two ways of looking at it as there are with most things in the world i suppose one way is is that it was an act of enormous uh amnesiac amnesia of verging on cowardice in the part both of the french state and on the part of the part of the republic and on the part of french jews but i remember very well um this is a strange story but uh when we lived in paris we live for a while it says uh 16 router prairie clay and the rue de playa eau claire in paris is one of those odd streets that changes its name halfway down so it it begins as the loose engine then becomes the word to play eau claire so right next door to us was says um and that was the um particulare of the david vai family one of the great french jewish families and whenever we would order a taxi would end up at their place and they figured this out after a while and very generously they recognized that we were uh from america and they invited us uh for lunch on the basis of the constantly annoying taxis that were coming for for us and not for not for them and we and i remember having conversation with this about them because they had been um looted their their house had been looted um and very little recovered some as as you know some got recovered a lot did not it took over time and their attitude was and i remember being very moved by to the time was basically we cannot live in those years we cannot live for the rest of our lives obsessing about those years they were tragic and they were terrible but they were a moment in our history and we cannot allow ourselves to reside there and i know many french jews who had exactly that feeling that if you um uh you know it's a bit like um lot's wife if you turn back and look at that you will turn to stone you know that's such a powerful mythological uh uh impetus that and and it comes up in your book in a different way and as you say at one point i don't want to hear about move forward i don't want to hear you use those very words right that it's sickening to be told to move forward and i you know when reading your book this is a somewhat you know it's a morbid parenthesis but i can't help it i you know when even when we say they were deported to auschwitz we we don't begin to grasp the scale of the horror you mentioned in the book three days without water um is part of it but then you arrive i just did a piece about mengele not not that long ago and it's simply impossible to understand the not just the uh annihilation but the cruelty the absolute sadistic cruelty that those poor good people went through in their last moments on earth so this is to say that i have some understanding and some sympathy with the with the the french jews whose feeling was very strongly that if we allow ourselves to inhabit that time forever we will never live again so so this is so significant and so significant so you know obviously i think my grandmother and my great uncle who who i was very close to i write about in the heaven and my and my grandmother who um who very profoundly um made a life in england um and uh a good life in england um and always remembered those of her family that who had been killed but but i don't think ever ever ever forgave um the viennese because she said it's not up to me to forgive uh forgive them um but but she didn't live in that moment she didn't live in that stage digital you know completely as your neighbors did in paris um they refused to be trapped by that but there is a need for this storytelling you know there is an absolute need when you cross that courtyard in kamundo music to to tell the story you have to tell the story again because it hasn't been told fully and it hasn't been told often enough and because there are different kinds of absences um at the heart of of these stories that need to be explored and amplified and it's so it's not about forgiveness and it's certainly damn it not about catharsis and um but it it and it's not about being owned by that particular moment but it is absolutely imperative to return it's an absolute imperative to return i i really believe that yes i i think i think that's right and this is such a complicated story too because you know i went to bordeaux to cover the papone trial which was the only trial of who was directly engaged in the deportations and of course the key witness the star witness was robert paxton a non-jewish american historian who had gone back and done the essential archival work on what had really happened to vichy in a way that no french historian would undertake at that time but the and as i say you know i but i don't want to um it's easy for those of us on this side of the water american jews uh and it was one of the oddest moments of my life uh was we were settled in the courtyard um says rue du pleasure and i forget exactly how it happened but somebody showed us across that somebody very friendly person in the building had written to someone else saying oh a young jewish family have moved into the the courtyard now we were my wife is not um jewish but we were certainly i'm no shame and i no one in the world could be more jewish than i am um but still it was sort of shocking to be identified that way and it was a reminder of a certain side of uh of a french life if we had moved into new york would be or one of those horrible yuppie families that moved into the courtyard no one would have singled us out for ethnic particularization just for class condemnation uh at that time but uh one of the things and it's one of the complexities of the story you're telling it seems to me is what are we remembering because in one way we're remembering betrayal and assimilation on the other hand and this is i think even more urgent for us at this moment because one of the risks as you know edmund and i i say this i know with some audacity because it's not something that we like to say too often it's very easy for american jews to luxuriate a funny word to use in the uh in the the sacrament of the of the showa in the idea that that uh if we regularly revisit it that gives uh it's our passover and it's something we can visit and feel wounded by and then and then uh use in a certain sense but one of the things that's very powerful in your book it seems to me is the model of cosmopolitanism which is a much more complicated uh concept and that is that the commander family though as we've been talking for this past hour were very assimilating they built the petite trianon on the rue so they collected french decorative arts and so on nonetheless they called their their he called his son nisam he didn't call him uh even nathaniel he called war much less uh jacques um they maintained very much that sense and their lives in many ways for me are uh a vindication not of assimilation but of cosmopolitanism the possibility of living in many places at once and you say and the closest thing you ever come to a moral or a message not being a writer with messages um that you find no contradiction in the idea of being a native or a citizen of many many cities at once yeah i mean i that's that's my last letter to him i say you know i'm you know a quarter dutch quarter austrian half english brought up in the anglican faith but jewish and quaker and a bit buddhist i'm sorry i relapsed everything adam you know yes um and and and you know and but that i absolutely believe in in this um in in in the vigor and the necessity of being able to move across borders you know and be a whole human being you don't leave part of you behind as you move you don't have to you're not necessarily wounded and fractured by that by that move so um and you certainly don't have to be called out by you know by nativist rhetoric being told you know you belong and you don't belong you know you're not authentically this and you're certainly you're impurely that which of course is what's happening constantly toxically at the moment and so you know as you say i don't do messages but dammit that is my message i mean that's yes that is my end you know it really the last it's what you write in the last letter in the book and it seems to me terribly important if you'll forgive me um editorializing for a moment because it's morally easy for us to uh embrace the command of family and their tragedy but it's also more demanding for us to recognize that it's uh a tragedy a fail of cosmopolitanism in other words that their ideal was not simply uh of belonging to one place but to be several places at once and to feel those those roots and that is exactly to say that's the ideal that's under assault right now it's under assault in england it's under assault here um and though one of the lessons i think of your book is surely the the the affirmation of the positive side of of the jewish appetite for citizenship in particular places it's also about the limits of one place and uh the necessity of feeling it of belonging the inevitability of belonging exactly exactly and and and you know um to be able to talk about belonging is really important and to be able to just i mean i hope celebrate belong you know and i i like you know sort of you're almost in conclusion i mean you know this isn't this is about which absolutely i hope celebrates you know someone who really loved living that's why i want to write to the right to the man is he absolutely loved the plurality of life you know the plurality of of of of what it might mean to to to live in this place and to enjoy literature food and you know all these things and that's that's kind of that is cosmopolitanism in a way that probably hasn't been kind of looked at and thought through for for a while but but needs it or or sufficiently defended you know it's it seems to me that it's easy to defend um identity it's easy to see um the experience of the european jews as a lesson in not denying your identity because your identity sooner or later will come and and refuse to be denied that's true but it's also it seems to me a lesson in the uh the eternal beleaguerement but also the eternal benevolence of the cosmopolitan ideal um anyway that's the message i choose to to take from it admit i know one of the things that was in gay involved with this project was a an art project that you did um uh work as well well i i'm still i mean i'm sitting here in my studio if if you just if i took you by the hand and walked you and we walked down instead so yes there's going to be an exhibition at the museum scene they're called in in begins in october a year and a half delayed um and it's extraordinary because this is the first time since since he died 1935 there's ever been anything changed or moved or anything contemporary in that space um so it's it's it's a really complicated and interesting challenge to bring anything into those spaces not unlike though the challenge you had doing your your installation at the frick yeah bloody terrifying both of them absolutely bloody terrifying so you know um um and so yeah and what so what do you do what do you bring in and and and um you know come and see come on we i i if we are allowed back into france um uh by september october we have we have um uh uh reasons to go so we will try and uh uh we will definitely be there in fact uh to see it i will confess with uh though i lived in france in paris for many years i never went to the musee uh commando it's not as it's a little off the beaten track one of the joys of paris of course this is a subject you've written about and i wish you would do a whole book devoted to it edmund is the joy of the small eccentric museum um fight final i mean you know really hot so i think i think the next our next date is probably you know um given your um extraordinary story um marvelous lyrical relationship with food is for you to for us to meet in a parisian restaurant continue the conversation adam i i cannot imagine anything i would prefer i'm already revolving the choices uh in my head the one positive thing i i i would be lying you said the one positive thing this pandemic in which martha my wife you know well um and i have truly not left the house except to walk the dog for 14 months um has been that um there's having no choice i've had to cook every night and i've actually been um in my my friend malcolm gladwell's ten thousand hours there i've actually gotten to be better so maybe we'll rent a kitchen someplace and i will do for you my uh my uh my late my latest thing thank you i mean that's just you know your work takes on the the pluralism of possession and the paces of possession um in ways that no one else's does and you realize it as art and you realize it as writing and uh uh all of us are grateful to you for um the uh lyricism and the honesty of your vision adam you're a true friend and a wonderful interlocutor and a marvelous cook so bless you thank you so much it's been absolute joy thank you thank you thank you you

Channel: thejewishmuseum

Views: 3,598

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Edmund de Waal, Letters to Camondo, Moise de Camondo, The Hare with Amber Eyes, Adam Gopnik, Musée Nissim de Camondo

Id: yX1D-1Qc3kM

Length: 56min 14sec (3374 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021