On Louis Malle and Childhood Under An Oppressive Regime

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I love research. I hate writing, so “research” is the best excuse to avoid writing while still telling yourself “Hey, I’m working on the book!” And it has the extra benefit of being absolutely a true and necessary part of the process – especially when writing about a time and place you’ve never lived, if you want to get it right.

My stepmother was a hidden child in WWII Hungary, a 5-y-o little Jewish girl sent to live on a farm with a Catholic family, in the guise of an orphaned niece; she was fortunate to survive the war, and eventually emigrated to the US. After my first novel, A Child out of Alcatraz, was published 25 years ago, I was casting about for my next project – my stepmother’s story, which I learned about when I was twelve, had always fascinated me: what goes on in the mind of a child, whose identity and sense of self is still forming and fragile, forced to live in a kind of psychological duality? How does a child make sense of what is “real” and what is pretend”? Especially when the stakes are so high? How can a child even understand what is at stake? I decided to use this as the inspiration for a novel: At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf.

Daunting. I chose to begin my character at the age of 12, and set it in France, feeling more familiar with the history and culture. But I quickly realized I had only the most casual knowledge of WWII history, the Vichy Government, the true meaning of collaboration with the Germans, and the already-existing vein of French anti-Semitism, let free to flourish in the “spirit” of that collaboration. I’m Jewish, but a secular, atheist, matzoh-brei Jew – no true idea what the Jews of that time and place experienced beyond my general knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, which tended to focus on Germany, Poland, military strategies, the Allies vs. the Axis. The camps. My ignorance also included: the trauma inflicted upon hidden children of war, Catholicism, and the basic facts of existence in day-to-day Nazi-Occupied France. My depiction of the character’s experience needed to honor those lived – and died – in that time and place, needed to be grounded in an accurate and authentic reality. I was not telling my stepmother’s story – she actually remembers little about the experience, but will never forget being warned: Don’t ever, ever cry. So, I was starting from scratch.

For me, research and writing have a symbiotic relationship. I sketch out a rough idea of the story and character, while simultaneously digging into the messy, dusty annals of information (my four years of research for Alcatraz was all pre-internet – oh, that microfiche crackle, that smell of moldy, never-opened old books high atop shelves in libraries and archives!) Research is a beautiful thing, a treasure hunt. It is thrilling to discover facts and figures that break open pre-conceived assumptions and offer new narrative and dramatic possibilities; equally thrilling to learn the language of the character’s consciousness and world, their frame of reference, to discover metaphorical or symbolic nuances. While digging out the rough clay of my novel, I am constantly returning to research, hoping to find new jewels (or just take a break from the mess), then back to the writing mudpit, a repeating cycle of months, years. One day, this will be a sculpture, I reassure myself: the story of a young Jewish girl in WWII France, forced to live in hiding in the country as a Catholic orphan, with people she’s never met. Don’t speak to the police. Don’t ever, every cry. And remember what’s at stake: if you make a mistake, the police will come kill all of us.

Writing and researching At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf has been a twenty-five-year process. I began with the facts and figures of history itself: textbooks, memoirs, testimonies, documentaries. Experiential research: trips to France, in part to access materials in museums, libraries, and archives, all unavailable in the US, but also to quite literally breathe the air of my characters, observe the colors of the twilight sky (the hour “between dog and wolf), feel the cobblestones beneath my feet, all the critical details of verisimilitude and authenticity. But I also spent a great deal of time with stories already dramatized, the novels and films from the era – and novels and films about the era. (Say what you like about Netflix; once I’d watched my 3^rd or 4^th WWII documentary, the “Because You Watched ___, You Might Also Like ___” feature led me to a trove of obscure but powerful stories I never would have found on my own.) Fictional stories can hold greater sway over us than the history book; we’re a story-needing species, after, all, we crave representation of our trials and tribulations while often longing for the comfortable distance offered by fictional narrative. As EL Doctorow said: “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you how it felt.” One film, in particular, brought me into the feeling of a young Jew living in world of Nazi-Occupied France and made a significant impression on me; Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987), written and directed by French auteur Louis Malle.

The film ostensibly is the story of young Julien, a sheltered and spoiled kid sent off to provincial St. John of the Cross boarding school. An academic stand-out, Julien takes a dislike to a new kid in school, whom he perceives as rival: Jean Bonnet, quiet, studious, with a mysterious air and vague answers to questions about absent parents and childhood. He says he’s Protestant, doesn’t take Communion, avoids choir practice, doesn’t say the Hail Mary during an air raid, offers another kid the last piece of pork on the platter. Jean is subjected to typical new-boy hazing, in which Julien eagerly participates. But a tentative friendship forms; the boys bond over music and their love of reading, an unspoken but shared sense of not quite fitting in.

At this point, anti-Semitism in the town feels casual, not especially threatening: a “No Jews Allowed” sign on the public bath (where the kindly head Priest steers Jean toward one of the private tubs instead of the communal shower); a villager’s tossed-off “Jews and Communists are worse than the Germans”; Julien himself is called “a real Jew” when he drives a hard bargain on a food swap with a disgruntled kitchen worker. When Julien asks his older brother “What’s a Jew, really?” and why people dislike them, his brother merely offers they’re people who don’t eat pork, and people are against them “Because they’re smarter than us, and they crucified Jesus, that’s why.” When Jean is invited to lunch with Julien’s visiting mother, an elderly Jewish man in the restaurant is angrily asked to leave by a French policeman; “It’s off-limits to Yids!”, and it’s a German officer sitting nearby who intervenes, allows the gentleman to stay, and throws the French Police out – while mostly a show of power, it nevertheless reinforces the idea there is no real threat here, not really.

But Julien, curious about this new kid/friend, snoops and discovers Jean Bonnet is actually Jean Kippelstein, a Jewish boy in hiding; when the kind Priest asks him to be extra-nice to Jean, he puts it all together. After a few “testing” remarks – which Jean furiously rebuffs – the friendship is reset and strengthened by a shared new understanding of Jean’s precarious situation. Fooling around at the piano together, Julien quietly asks: “Are you scared?” “All the time,” Jean answers, and this delicate moment speaks so much: Julien’s maturation and new sense of empathy, Jean’s willingness to trust Julien enough to be so dangerously vulnerable.

And then the Gestapo arrives. They barge into a classroom, asking for Jean Kippelstein. A tense silence; Julien glances over at Jean, the Germans see, and Jean is taken away – along with the kind Priest, and other Jewish boys he had been hiding in the school, all of them denounced by the resentful kitchen worker. The Priest and Jewish kids are marched away, in front of the assembled school; Jean, head high, turns to give a brief farewell wave to his friend. We linger on Julien’s face, tears gathering, and hear Louis Malle – Julien is the young Louis in this film, based on Malle’s actual experience with a Jewish friend at school, that Jean and the other Jewish boys died at Auschwitz; the kindly Priest at Mauthausen. “More than 40 years have passed, but I’ll remember every second of that January morning until the day I day.”

I first saw Au Revoir Les Enfants at an independent cinema in 1987. I didn’t remember much – mostly that it felt rather slow, undramatic. So I rewatched the film while writing the novel, and this time it hit hard. The food scarcity, the icy winters, the day-to-day struggles and humiliations under Occupation. The villager’s necessary repression of hatred, at times to the point of submissive collaboration, for the German occupiers. The Jew-hating and scapegoating in the air. The bravery of the kindly Priest, risking all. The emotional growth of a sheltered, spoiled young boy. But most of all: that quiet, delicate moment between young friends, when Julien acknowledges he is scared “all the time” – the relentless tension of a life lived always on the edge, knowing every second what is risked, what is at stake.

That moment lives in my heart. I thought of it often while writing At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf – it’s a quiet, internal novel, focused primarily to one young girl’s experience, and I’d been concerned, from time to time, there wasn’t enough “drama” in my story: no Nazis banging at the door to round children up; no brutal violence; we rarely leave the subdued little village where my character lives. But Malle understood how it is those quiet and delicate moments – moments of hope and fear, a weighing of trust and distrust, a longing for human connection balanced against a terrified need for secrecy, the fine line between dog and wolf – that can change our personal histories, have a resonance and relevance that affects us in deeply profound ways. The moments we remember all our lives. My stepmother, now in her eighties, still has never once cried.

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