A Semite by Denis Guenoun

Author:Denis Guenoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI027000, Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction, SOC049000, Social Science/Jewish Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Here the letters, the date book, all writing cease. I’ll never know the reunion, the kisses, the yoo-yoos of the grandmother, the cries and tears of the baby, the shy, happy smile of my future mother. The opening of the presents, the repainted accordion and its slipcover, the laughter, the war finished, the big meal under the ancestor’s gaze. Or the stories, the Juras, the sleds, the snow. Germany, Stuttgart in ruins, the north, the world’s other face. Or the embrace, the bodies twined together for whole long nights, the nudity, the heavy breathing, the silence of the night sky, the panoply of stars over Oran.

I will never know, it’s a total eclipse. Pencils down, a respite from signs. I was born on May 25 the following year, nine months and five days later. Something of the missing text ran into my veins. They could perfectly well have made other children after the release from prison—fifteen months—or during the leaves from his year in Morocco. They were waiting for the end, the transformation of the world. This time they must have unleashed something, given in without reserve, loosed the sperm cells, sparked the climax—and here I am. Who? Me. Who? One more, never mind who, anyone, but this one nonetheless, none other, created in that encounter, in that place at that time, from the joining of cells, during that reunion, an embrace after six years, the collapsing of one time and the arrival of another, a baby boomer is sown, a man, a Jew if you will from his four grandparents, circumcised like his elder brother to preclude any difference between them, poorly made like all human flesh, wobbly, uncertain, infirm like all lives that will have to end, a small irrefutable proof that the Nazi dream had failed, the one that would have foreclosed my birth, a kid, a sorry little spot in the world, one more Semite.

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