Talk:Sarah Kofman

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Untitled

The entry currently claims that Kofman's father was arrested by the Vichy police. The following URL [1] suggests otherwise:

In 1942, Sarah Kofman's father, who was a Polish rabbi, was arrested by the Gestapo in the family house in the Rue Ordener and put on a train to Auschwitz, where he was beaten to death by a camp guard. The children were sent to French families outside Paris, but Sarah wouldn't be separated from her mother so both sought refuge with a former neighbor who lived in the Rue Labat, a woman Sarah loved passionately. To protect the Jewish girl, as well as to turn her into her own daughter, the woman, who's name is not mentioned, transformed Sarah into a French girl: she changed her hair and gave her new clothes, she called her Suzanne and taught her to eat pork and steaks cooked in butter. The relationship with this woman alienated Sarah completely from her Yiddish speaking family and her religion. Sarah's real mother had great difficulties and pain in accepting the situation, but Sarah was happy and she adored her new mother, who used to kiss and cuddle her and give her presents, things she hadn't be used to in the strict, religious and also very poor family she was born into. After the war, there was a bitter fight between the two women because both wanted to keep the girl. Suzanne had to become Sarah again and go back to her own mother, who abused her and didn't want her to go to college, while the other woman always supported her wish to read and study. Sarah hated her mother and she tried on several occasions to run away and go back to the woman she called Mémé, which is a term of endearment used by children to call their grandmother, but also sounds like mamme or memme, the Yiddish word for mother.

In any case, subject to verificationm, a number of these details could be included to explain further the choice of title and subject matter of Rue Ordener, rue Labat. Anyone know of any reliable sources for these claims (I suppose the URL cited might suffice, as the author is reasonably credentialed, although I'm not sure of the reputation of the publishing journal). Buffyg 06:20, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sarah Kofman wrote this on page 34 of Smothered Words:

My father, a rabbi, was killed because he tried to observe the Sabbath in the death camps; buried alive with a shovel for having—or so the witnesses reported—refused to work on that day, in order to celebrate the Sabbath, to pray to God for them all, victims and executioners, reestablishing, in this situation of extreme powerlessness and violence, a relation beyond all power. And they could not bear that a Jew, that vermin, even in the camps, did not lose faith in God. As he did not lose faith in God on that afternoon of July 16, 1942, when a French policeman came to round him up with a pained smile on his lips, almost as if he, too, were excusing himself. Having gone to warn the Jews of the synagogue to go and hide because he knew there would be a raid, he had returned to the house to pray to God that he be taken, so long as his wife and his children were spared. And instead of hiding, he left with the policeman; so that we would not be taken in his place, as hostages, he suffered, like millions of others, the infinite of violence: death in Auschwitz.

Mtevfrog 11:42, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I tried to fill in bits of this with a summary of Rue Ordener, rue Labat. I need to check some of the details against the book, perhaps offering more precise references. I've been trying to clean up that last set of edits, but my changes seem to be getting lost in the proxies. Buffyg 10:27, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]