Journal of Jewish Identities

ABSTRACT:

Written by Michel Cojot (a.k.a. Cojot-Goldberg), a hidden child, son of a deportee, would-be Nazi killer, and hostage during the 1976 Entebbe hijacking crisis, Écorché juif (1980) presents a post-Holocaust cautionary tale and a micro-historic guide to the second half of the twentieth century. It documents the twisting double binds of French Jews in the postwar period, the rise of modern terror, and new antisemitism. By the end of the 1970s, the progressive writing-into-history of French responsibility in the persecution of its Jews (in the works of Goldman, Modiano, Schwarz-Bart, and Joffo, among others) also coincided with new discourses of denial, and this at a time when the place of Jews in France was again being questioned, now more literally, in relation to the existence of Israel. This essay will show how the text's parodic inventory of French Jewish and national memory in films, books, and institutions simultaneously archives critical turning points in the postwar and postcolonial histories and literatures of France and French Jews.