Little nugget published at the beginning of the year, on January 04, at Zulma editions, This night of Joachim Schnerf summarizes in a touching and humorous way sometimes, the many traditions and celebrations of the Jewish holidays of Passover.
You didn't know Joachim Schnerf? He was born in 1987 in Strasbourg and currently lives in Paris where he is a publisher of foreign literature. After Mon sang à l'études, his first novel published by Éditions de l'Olivier, he plunges us (thanks to Zulma editions), with This night, into the intimacy of a family, stretched on the thread of the memory of a man in the evening of his life.A novel of great sensitivity.
This Passover Night
The novel opens on the morning of the first day of Passover, the Jewish Passover. This year, for the first time, Solomon, the hero of this novel, will have to celebrate Passover with his family without his half. Indeed, his wife, his "sweet and wonderful" Sarah, had died two months earlier.
To the brutality of mourning are added the different anxieties of welcoming his two daughters, two sisters who do not support each other and who do not cease, one, Michelle, to despise her eldest, the other, Denise, to fear her youngest. There will also be his sons-in-law, and grandchildren, since it is during the Seder that Solomon will revive the children the sudden freedom of the Jewish people after the years of slavery. It is he who must transmit, once again, the testimony of the exit of the Jewish people from Egypt, through many rituals including the traditional questions of children.
Why is this night different from other nights?
At this perspective, he recalls in a somewhat poetic way, the evenings of the previous years with Sarah and thus anticipates what will not fail to happen. What you need to know is that Solomon, the hero of this novel, is a Holocaust survivor. One of the many that Auschwitz orphaned, but unlike many, he needs humor to externalize the demons that have haunted him since his detention in a concentration camp. Concentration camp humor to unlock the trauma of horror. His jokes are not always received as they should but it is a subject that is impossible for him to approach seriously. He never talked about everything he went through. Except Tonight.
"Would you be willing to talk about it?" Sarah hesitated for several weeks before questioning me, she finally chose a modest pronoun rather than articulate Auschwitz. I talked about it all the time, yes, but telling? Impossible, I only had my jokes to evoke the Holocaust.
Written with intelligence and subtlety, this 146-page novel is an interesting and moving encounter with Jewish culture. Behind a dark humour, Salomon hides this deep wound of a Holocaust survivor who must now face this new pain: loneliness and the cruel lack of the loved one.
"I lean on the furniture to catch my breath and feel his hand resting on mine. Sarah's hand obsesses me, our hands that never left each other. Our hands eating, our hands falling asleep. These palms that it was impossible for us to take off, built for each other. Like a rock hugs the water that licks it every day."
We can only warmly recommend that you read Tonight, on the one hand because it perfectly traces the dramatization of certain Jewish customs, but also because it invites us to reflect, in a moving way, on the transmission of family silences, and the difficulty of continuing to live after the loss of the loved one.
