The play of public and private helps to provide a possible solution to a central problem of Kofman’s text: how can she create a textual monument that, on the one hand, is is true to her personal experience and that, simultaneously, creates an intersubjective space in which a reader, that is, another person, can come to understand that experience. On the one hand, Kofman is leery of putting forward her experience as somehow emblematic of every wartime experience. As I mention above, she purposely omits contextual details that would ground her experience in larger historical trends. Yet to write a purely personal memoir would be an exercise in hermeticism. Kofman intended to, and did, publish her work for others to read. Kofman bookends her text with discussions of two monuments, one very public and the other very private. Neither of these monuments is sufficient to represent her experience to another. Between those two monuments stretches her response to this challenge: a text that upends the distinction between public and private in order to allow a third, intersubjective space to come into existence. This, she argues, is the domain of writing. The one traditional monument discussed at any length is mémé’s tomb, mentioned in the final sentence of the text. She writes, “je sais que le prêtre a rappelé sur sa tombe qu’elle avait sauvé une petite fille juive pendant la guerre.” [“I know that at her grave the priest recalled how she had saved a little Jewish girl during the war” ] The priest’s words are the final words on mémé and the final words in Kofman’s book. A tombstone is an ending, a conclusion. What is written on it, or said over it, is meant to be the durable legacy of a person’s life. Yet the words at mémé’s tomb fill the reader with mistrust: Kofman’s whole book seems to stand in opposition to the priest’s pat statement. mémé did not just “save,” Kofman, after all, she also saved her mother. Yet at the same time she separated Kofman from her mother irrevocably. And an argument could be made that the little girl who entered mémé’s apartment at the beginning of the war was not the one who left after the liberation: from her clothing to her diet, rolling hydro tables mémé transformed Kofman into a more French, Christian girl.

Placed at the end of a book that so unflinchingly looks at the torturous ambiguity of her feelings and experience, the priest’s words seem terribly inadequate as a summary of their relationship. How could a simple marker and a short speech really do justice to the relationship between Kofman and mémé? In this light, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat stands in opposition to the simplicity of the tomb as a complex monument to mémé. The tomb’s very substantialness, its promise that it is the final word on mémé, seems duplicitous or propagandistic in comparison. If there is a discourse of tombs, Kofman may be saying, beware of what they say. The permanence, solidity and public nature of the traditional monument is an inapt representation of the fluidity and fragility of memory and legacy, especially in the context of a book that takes as its subject the metaphorical insubstantiality of things that we tend to think of as solid: family, religion, identity, home and even language. Other monuments in Kofman’s text have a greater claim to truth in that they are fragile testaments not to presence , but testaments to absence. Most of these monuments, perhaps more accurately, mementos, relate to her father. The book opens with a description of such a monument, Kofman’s father’s pen. Placed in implicit opposition to the traditional tomb described at the end of the book, we are encouraged to compare the fragile pen with mémé’s tomb, and to consider the pen as a monument. “De lui, il ne me reste que le stylo,” [“Of him all I have left is the fountain pen” ] writes Kofman . This pen, which “m’a ‘lachée’ avant que je puis me décider de l’abandonner” [“‘failed’ me before I could bring myself to give it up” ] no longer functions, even though it has been “rafistolé avec du scotch” 6. [“patched up with Scotch tape” ] This pen, a standin for her father, a way, when it functioned, to experience a tenuous physical connection with him, is now a stand-in for the absence of her father. Yet it is that absence that “me contraindre à écrire, écrire” [“makes me write, write” ], positioning Kofman’s writing as another expression of absence . It is in the absence of the functioning pen and in the absence of her father that her writing takes shape.

Her father’s last letter to her family, written from the Drancy prison camp, similarly serves as more of a monument to absence than to former presence. Kofman writes, “Nous ne revîmes, en effet, jamais mon père. Aucune nouvelle non plus, sauf une carte envoyé de Drancy, écrite à l’encre violette, avec un timbre sur le dessus représentant le maréchal Pétain. Elle était écrite en français de la main d’un autre” . [“As it turned out, we never did see my father again. Or get any news of him, either, except a card sent from Drancy, written in purple ink, with a stamp on it bearing Marshal Pétain’s picture. It was written in French by someone else’s hand” ] While any letter represents the absence of the writer, this card is doubly a symbol of absence, since it is written by another in a language her father does not speak. Kofman’s father is already becoming a ghost, disembodied. His handwriting—a link, after all, to the body that produced the text—is no longer accessible. All the while Pétain hovers above his words, reminding the recipient that they and the sender no longer have the privilege of private communication. Yet despite these pressures, his words and personality come through: he is asking for cigarettes, his great pleasure . [In this last sign of life we had from him, where he told us he was being deported, he asked that in two kilogram packages we were legally authorized to send we be sure to include cigarettes ] And despite the letter’s weakness as a proxy for her father, when Kofman cannot find the letter after her mother’s death, she writes, “c’était comme si j’avais perdu mon père une seconde fois” [“it was as if I had lost my father a second time” ]. Like the broken pen, Kofman writes about the absence of the letter, itself a testament to the absence of her father’s own writing, which, in turn, signifies the absence of the man who wrote. In this chain of absence, Kofman’s father announces his presence in that last letter by a request for cigarettes. The smoke from cigarettes is a fitting symbol for an absent man. “‘Envoie-moi surtout des cigarettes, des gauloises bleus or vertes,’” [“‘Most of all, send cigarettes, blue or green Gauloises’” ] he writes in that final letter. Kofman’s memory of this request provides a link to another, earlier memory, of the end of the Sabbath as the moment when her father was able to smoke again. Cigarette smoke, like Kofman’s father and the objects that represent him, is a play of presence and absence, a symbol of the functioning of memory. The smoke is the present evidence of the absent smoker and the burned cigarette, with a tenuous connection to the person who exhaled it. The smoke chains together Kofman’s separate memories of her father, connecting his final letter to his family with a memory of him lighting a cigarette after the sabbath. Yet smoke also disappears gradually into the air, vertical horticulture like a fading memory. A trace of its scent can linger on for longer until it, too, fades. These private mementos of her father, the pen and the letter, appropriately capture the evanescence of memory and the feeling of absence that is, in a sense, the essence of Kofman’s memory of her father.

These mementos fall short of being true monuments, however. Alone, the pen and the letter only have evocative power for Kofman herself. They stand as private monuments, but not public ones. Mémé’s tomb, upon which a simplified narrative is carved in stone, cannot provide truth. More honest are the mementos of Kofman’s father, since in their very fragility and absence they allow the holder to reexperience the loss of a loved one. Yet if a discussion of monuments and memory in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat were to end here, an enormous part of the book would be neglected. Much of the text involves the streets and spaces of Paris. How can we reconcile this memoir, a book about memory, with the preeminence of space of the city? Between the bookends of the private, absent monuments to Kofman’s father’s absence and mémé’s public, solid, untrustworthy tomb stretch the Paris streets, which function both as a stone monument like mémé’s tomb and a testament to the absence of those who lived on these streets and the complexities of their lives.The Vichy statement seems to contend that Clermont-Tonnerre’s requirement that the Jews “soient individuellement citoyens” has not been followed, though the Vichy government will still extend some of the respect that Clermont-Tonnerre saidshould belong to the individual Jew, excepting certain positions of power7. As with Clermont-Tonnerre, the Vichy government sees Jews as “corruptive and finally decaying” because of their “individualistic tendency” of keeping to themselves as a group. Such an argument implies an either/or logic: either you are a member of the Jewish community, or the French one. The idea of the Jewish neighborhood might have seemed to reinforce these ideas: a space occupied by a community with a particular ethnic belonging looked, to the Vichy mind, a lot like the “nation within a nation” that Clermont-Tonnerre finds unacceptable. Yet, as Caron argues, a “nation within a nation” would be more like a ghetto and less like a neighborhood. A ghetto has tight, clear borders that inhabitants may not be allowed to breach while the borders of a neighborhood are fluid and traversable. Caron shows that Mayol’s description of a neighborhood as both public and private gives the lie to the idea that public and private zones can ever be completely separated, and thus also to the idea that one could lead a life in public without any kind of reference to the life lived in private. The relationship of the individual to his or her neighborhood is therefore, as Mayol says, “existential.” Caron shows how this existential relationship carries over to how inhabitants of a city understand themselves as individuals and part of the collective, not just how they understand the relationship between their homes, the neighborhood and the rest of the world. In Kofman’s text, as in Mayol and Caron’s writing, the problem of public and private, of their relationship and how they might be negotiated by the individual, is more complex than simply imagining the private home and the public street. As with the bombed out building, these distinctions are not easily negotiated. At issue in Kofman’s text is the question of who exactly she is, and how she might write an autobiographical text that is the story of her confusion about her identity. Is she the Jewish girl who grew up speaking Yiddish and admiring her father, the rabbi? How could she be? She forgot her Yiddish and purposefully distanced herself from Judaism. Is she “Suzanne,” mémé’s daughter? No again, since she also has a relationship, albeit fractious, with her biological mother. During the occupation, Kofman has a public, Christian mother, and a private, Jewish, mother. This situation mimics her experience on the streets of occupied Paris: publicly, she can only appear as mémé’s Christian daughter, while her private Jewish identity languishes in a back room of mémé’s apartment. Kofman’s walk from her mother’s apartment on rue Ordener to mémé’s on rue Labat is a central moment in the text, symbolizing Kofman’s negotiation of her identity in the not-quite-private and not-quite-public environment of the neighborhood. It is significant that Kofman vomits on rue Marcadet, the path from rue Ordener to rue Labat. Vomiting is an act of rejection, but it is also a way of making public what is private.