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Henri Béhar Colloque des Invalides, October 28, 2016

I do not intend to treat here of Proust's Jewishness or of In Search of Lost Time (ISLT), which has been done many times, and well done. I myself published Les Clés d'À la RTP with Pocket editions in 2006. The work is now accessible, free of charge, on my site

Today, given the time allotted to us, I will address only one question, of a linguistic order, or more precisely lexical: the subtle presence of Yiddish words in ISLT.

While browsing through the list of words used by Proust in ISLT, which a lexicometry software provides me in alphabetical order (which has the advantage of having to read only a tenth of the volume), I come across this form visibly foreign to the French language: meshores (משרת)[1]. It is found in Within a Budding Grove, toward the end:

"He murmured an unintelligible phrase where one could only distinguish: 'When the Meschorès are there.' Meschorès designates in the Bible the servant of God. Between them the Blochs used it to designate the servants and were always amused by it because their certainty of not being understood either by Christians or by the servants themselves, exalted in Mr. Nissim Bernard and Mr. Bloch their double particularism of 'masters' and 'Jews.' But this latter cause of satisfaction became one of discontent when there were people around."

The explanation of this term by the Narrator himself is such that the reader should be able to stop there, totally satisfied. Proust designates the biblical origin of the term and provides its transcription, translation and pronunciation in French. Except that biblical Hebrew writes mechoret in the singular, mechoretim in the plural, and not meschorès, pronunciation proper to Ashkenazim (Ashkenazim I should say, since it's a plural). Here is the explanation given to us by a researcher at the Collège de France: "servant, serving" from Hebrew meshoret spelled mem, shin, resh, tav, with final – et, which in Yiddish, just like the finals in – ot and in – at of Hebrew, are pronounced – es. the plural of meshores is meshorsim (masc. plur.)" (Anne Schulmeister), meshorsim (משרתים).

The context shows that this term designates both the servants of God and the simple servants in the family.

These judicious remarks of the Narrator raise only one question, of importance: where did the author get his information? Neither in the dictionary, nor in the rabbinate Bible (1899) nor even in any Bible, where the word appears often, first of all in Genesis; but quite simply through oral tradition, that of his mother, or his grandmother, who sometimes expressed themselves in this language common to Alsatian Jews. It is from them, it seems to me, that he holds the specification "servants of God," which is moreover not exclusive in the Old Testament. Let us not forget that despite their typically bourgeois education, such as it was dispensed in the best establishments of the capital, they were culturally, and even cultually, attached to their group of origin.

In short, Proust notes, in a pleasant and rare manner in his discourse, a frequent custom among masters of using a language unknown to servants to exchange remarks that do not concern the staff, or that the said staff must not understand. It is the same for children, called to hear without understanding what belongs to paternal intimacy.

B) A 2nd emergence of Yiddish appears five times in ISLT. Let us content ourselves with the first occurrence. When the Belgian ambassador d'Argencourt speaks of the actress Rachel's performance in a play by Maeterlinck: "— The Seven Princesses, oh! oïl, oïl, what snobbery! cried M. d'Argencourt. Ah but! wait, I know the whole play. The author sent it to the King who understood nothing of it and asked me to explain it to him." The Guermantes Way, p. 206.

He imitates the customary lament of Yiddish speakers, oy, oy!, thereby insidiously accusing the Jewish origins of the artist adored by good society. This leads the Duchess of Guermantes to say foolish things, for the pleasure of a witty word, showing her incomprehension of the Belgian playwright. To such an extent that the Narrator reproaches himself for the kilometers he covered each morning, in his youth, to reach his idol, really too idiotic. This teaches him life, and makes him understand that signs are deceptive.

If Proust were to use Yiddish in the manner of Kafka in his work, one would expect a word such as "meschuge" (משוגע) or "meschugge," today practically lexicalized in American. It means cracked, crazy, weak-minded. But we are in France, where one prefers crétin, popular doublet of chrétien. I found no occurrence of it in ISLT, which will surprise no one. On the other hand, I cannot fail to note this use of Schlemihl, here with a capital S, as for a proper name. In Yiddish, "schlamassel" shlimazl (שלימזל) designates the unlucky one, the one who has bad luck, from which Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838) drew his Schlemihl, in the tale Peter Schlemihl, The man who lost his shadow.

"I met him at several dress rehearsals, said M. Nissim Bernard [speaking of Bergotte]. He is awkward, he's a kind of Schlemihl.

"This allusion to Chamisso's tale had nothing very serious about it, but the epithet of Schlemihl was part of that half-German, half-Jewish dialect, the use of which delighted M. Bloch in intimacy, but which he found vulgar and misplaced before strangers." (JF, 69)

Here again, the Narrator behaves as a linguist, perfect disciple of his cousin Michel Bréal. He comments on this half-German, half-Jewish dialect (let us note the categorization of the time) which well designates Yiddish, language of intimacy for these assimilated Jews — or in the process of being so —, and the Narrator, whom we know to be very cultured, evokes The Strange Story of Peter Schlemihl or the man who sold his shadow (1820). To his brother who was translating this text into French, Chamisso wrote:

"Schlemihl is a Hebrew word which means gottlieb, theophile, beloved of God. In Jewish jargon, one thus calls unfortunate or clumsy people to whom nothing succeeds. A schlemihl breaks his finger in his jacket pocket, falls on his back and fractures his nose, and always arrives at the wrong time."

This qualification of the writer Bergotte by the banker Nissim Bernard is not very serious, the Narrator tells us, who interprets it with benevolence. He considers in the same way the use of Yiddish, familiar language, magnified by literature.

Indeed, world literature does not despise Yiddish vocabulary, since from a familiar word in this language it makes a very widespread character, the very example of the poor unlucky fellow. Without wanting to generalize, nor even reserve a particular fate for this literary occurrence of Yiddish, I notice the kind of tropism that leads Proust (via his characters) to highlight a novelistic prototype of which there are many examples elsewhere. He could even have compared it to Chaplin, the celestial vagabond, the idol of silent cinema! But that would have been doing too much honor to Bergotte!

To conclude, one will find these three occurrences less unusual when one has related them to the character who articulates them, and who is the banker Nissim Bernard or the ambassador d'Argencourt. In a certain way, the first is characterized by his references to Yiddish, as the banker Nucingen by his Alsatian accent in Balzac.

It would not occur to anyone to seek any relationship of Balzac with the Eastern province. So why think that Proust has some link, however tenuous, with the Yiddish language? It is not only that his dear grandmother came from Alsace, that his mother must have used these terms, this lamentation (if only ironically); it is that all this is singularly charged with affectivity, like a coded language that would only be known to two people: the language of complicity.

One would like to stick to these observations of a lexical order, if there were not this unheard-of accusation of Céline qualifying Proust's writing as "franco-yiddish convoluted absolutely outside of any French tradition," in a letter to Jean Paulhan[2]. I doubt that the author of Bagatelles pour un massacre noted these three occurrences, quite harmless after all. Proscribed, Céline certainly remembered that Proust had been the first to solicit Anatole France's signature in favor of Captain Dreyfus. And we know the germinative role that the Affair was to play for his entire work. It remains that this perception of a Yiddish substratum in Proust's writing calls for a study, which I cannot develop within the constrained framework of this Colloque des Invalides.

Henri Béhar

[1] I draw attention to the fact that the possessors of ISLT in the Pléiade edition established by Pierre Clarac will not find it in the text but in the notes. Likewise, neither the Frantext database, nor the tables of Proust's Vocabulary elaborated by Étienne Brunet, based on the same corpus, can account for it, for the reason that they do not take into account the notes.

[2] Céline, Letters to the NRF, Paris, Gallimard, 1991, piece n° 66, February 27, 1949, p. 88.