Tolka, 2025
In Tolka, Issue 10, translated by Tobias Ryan (from L’Époux, Gallimard), released on November 10th 2025
« The following autumn, you settle in America to study there and, ultimately, live. I will follow depending on administrative complications, and the whims of immigration and events. History, which we thought had reached its end, is on the point of reawakening; we experience the towers falling from our window. But this terrible shock and its consequences can’t mask the conflict your parents will poison us with for years to come.
Making the most of the courage granted to you by an entire ocean, you come out during a visit to Paris. The scene, as you will relay it, happens without an outburst: only “Ah,” a silence, then questions. My name comes up. Polite strain. A few days later, I am invited to dinner, this time as your partner. It is only when you are leaving again that the turmoil starts to manifest. It will last for years. Never direct rejection, but no acceptance either. A latent scandal embedded in the everyday, alternating between denial and a desire to understand, between mutter and discussion, from arguments between your parents to wounding harassment. They are ashamed, they blame themselves; she feels guilty.
Amid all the fuss, it is their own history as a couple and the never resolved tensions in their relationships with their own parents and families that resurface. On your mother’s side above all: the flight from Germany and exile, but also your grandparents disapproving of their daughter’s marriage to an educated but penniless Sephardi. Before long, your father wants to draw a line under the affair; he stiffens into a distant attitude, avoiding the subject. Alone, your mother argues with herself. She seeks out advice: Rabbi, what should I say, what should I do? I ask you the same questions, Doctor. And you, husband, let’s have it out! What has she done wrong? No answer. She addresses you: is it me? Is it your father? A deluge of emails bedevil vague hopes of calm. There is talk of my influence on you—this you, who met me and got his head turned upside down, and of whom there has never been the least sign, nothing even interpretable. Wasn’t there that young girl after high school? Your mother is trying to remember intercepted letters. You had been disappointed, but meeting the right person would be enough. As for me, I become that through whom scandal has arrived, and little by little am encircled by a cordon sanitaire which sticks me in the present moment, absent from photographs, my name rarely mentioned. And then there is another problem, no doubt minor in truth, which every now and then takes the spotlight: I am not Jewish. You could have thought we were in a gay New York comedy, less fun though it is to live through.
As for back-up, there is some, even if loved ones remain cautious. During our first trip together, I meet your paternal aunt. An immediate and mutual sympathy evolves from our nascent friendship. We begin a correspondence, me finding in her an unexpected listener. I write to her about my love for you, and how the underlying conflict causes hurt. She is the only person I can talk to about it. During phone conversations, she tells me about her life: of her birth in Bohemia, where her father had been sent by the family to develop the crystal trade with Egypt; of fleeing Hitler; of an adolescence spent in Alexandria, the cliques and outdated gossip of the old Levantine bourgeoisie, of studying the piano and the conservatory, a whole world swept away by Nasser; she had spent time in a Kibbutz, distancing herself from a romantic disappointment, this was followed by several difficult years behind closed borders; she had worked as a nurse in a hospital in Herzliya, and then in the suburbs of Tel Aviv; an unhappy marriage had pushed her to bury her musical career for good; her Zionism cooled, while her criticisms of the religious and the right have never stopped growing; the idealism of the Bund, to which she had never belonged, remains the lodestar of her youth.
Nonetheless, she has a taste for the epics of the Kibbutzim, those oh-so-prestigious pioneers, tanned and brave athletes who had created a new society in a new land. Having sacrificed her youthful and artistic dreams, twice chased off, from Egypt and from Europe, she still cherishes this ambiguous ideal. But times have changed, the Kibbutzim are in crisis, becoming a business, and she can’t bear the influx of French and American settlers who, in her eyes, betray the spirit of the founders and Ben Gurion himself, of whom, though, she is now a critic. When our relationship blows up, she works to mollify, and prevent you breaking things off with either your family or with me. Through her, we learn several secrets. Sodom and Gomorrah emerge from the recesses. An old female cousin lives with a woman, another, male, divorced for a man; there was an uncle who might have been and a distant great-aunt who had let it be understood; and then there was the slightly fragile nephew who had wanted to change sex and ended up marrying into the Chabad community, and who, even if recently divorced because he started beating his wife, remains very pious. Anything is possible.
Her talent as a mediator sometimes has limits. If we consider individuals as complex knots, they are often impossible to untangle from the wounds of History and those of the family. The notion that hardship broadens the mind is a tenacious belief, and unquestionably erroneous. The uncovering of a reality that was staring us in the face can have resonances and consequences that have no connection, or are without comparison, to the banality we discover. That is what happens: support and hostilities arise, and the features of several siblings, both your father’s and yours, are accentuated. And maybe that is the real scandal of coming out, lying under the religious and social prohibitions: it ravages the present, revealing disputes buried or blurred by time; it accentuates the veins of a fragmented tale we pretend or dream cohered; it painfully makes false pretences felt, and pulls the pin on unexpected truths.
Thanks to your aunt’s support and explanations, I understand some of your parents’ reactions better, even if she is surprised and overcome by her own resentment and annoyance with them. Sometimes she reports things I have suspected but don’t really want to know: she shares secrets of their marriage, of their disappointed loves, of what they have said about me. As for your father, she always favoured her younger brother, who is invited to family therapy with a lot more legitimacy in that he is a psychiatrist and obliging. But what she never manages to grasp is the old anti-Christian anger that has awoken in your mother, whose Judaism has become the object of delicate attention: she takes up Hebrew lessons again, makes donations to charities, follows the familiar rites more scrupulously. Does she think something in her upbringing went off the rails? It would be so simple! No, you are not a homosexual. Your mother refuses to hear the word. You have a friend, good, but why not get married to a woman anyway? And to fix that, you have to be even more Jewish. The tradition is full of such rhetoric: if catastrophe occurs, it’s because we have failed the Torah. For your aunt, it’s a load of nonsense; knocking around with the long beards can only make your head spin… »
Ill. Kiripi Katembo
2025