HAIFA, Israel — The Jewish people have a long experience of functioning in absurd situations. The very creation of the State of Israel was an unthinkable event, the realization of an unattainable dream. This is what the struggle between Soviet Jews and the Soviet authorities for the right of repatriation in the late 1960s and early 1970s looked like. At that time, there was a wave of worldwide protests against the policy of the Soviet authorities, which prohibited the repatriation of Jews to Israel.
In June 1967, Eugène Ionesco wrote: “When I think about how frantically antisemitism is revived under the mask of anti-Zionism or under the mask of progressive doctrines, and that all this is directed against the Jews of Russia, already scattered throughout the country, I cannot refrain from thinking about what would happen if there were no Jews on earth: there would have been no Christianity or Hasidism at all, there would never have been Freud or Bergson or Husserl or Einstein or Schoenberg. Not even Trotsky, not even Marx. The most antisemitic were the Soviet antisemites, who consider themselves Marxists.”
In 1968 Ionesco’s autobiographical book “PRÉSENT PASSÉ, PASSÉ PRÉSENT” was published. In July 1967, the author wrote: “At this moment there is no more war in Israel […] The world has prepared […] to deplore the massacre of 2,600,000 (Israel’s population at that time. – A. G.). But the victims did not agree to this and did not surrender. Those who wanted to kill them laid down their arms. Because of the defeat of the Arabs, there has been a change in public opinion in their favor by those who call themselves intellectuals. In particular, it is becoming increasingly clear to what extent antisemitic Russia supports the Arabs. […] Sartre condemns the Israelis for having attacked first. He argues that they are the aggressors. […] In fact, ideologically and strategically, the Egyptians attacked first. […] For months they have been preparing (for war. – A.G.) ideologically, strategically and propagandistically. Moreover, their army approached the borders of Israel. […] In an excellent article in Le Figaro Litterer, Klosterman explains well that the Egyptians, not the Jews, were the aggressors in the war against Israel (the Six Day War. – AG).” The Israelis were the victors, and therefore immediately lost the sympathy of the “progressive forces.” The historically established image of the weak and oppressed Jews has changed dramatically.
In contrast to the position of many French leftist intellectuals, Ionesco argued that Arab aggression against the Jews had taken place in the Six-Day War: “French Jewish intellectuals, poisoned by leftism, argue in letters to newspapers that the very presence of Jews in the country of Israel is an aggression against Arabs. They traitorously borrow this worldview from the Arabs. […] If Jewish life in Israel is aggression, then everything is aggression: the French are aggressors in Corsica, in Brittany and Languedoc. The Algerians are aggressors in Algeria, for they came there from another place. The entire continent of Europe is overrun by ‘aggressors’ who came from Iran and Asia.”
One of the pillars of modern European art, one of the 40 “immortal” academicians, the world-famous playwright Eugène Ionesco sided with little Israel against his colleagues. Three times the writer traveled to Israel to stage three of his plays and to participate in protests against the repression of Soviet Jews who wanted to repatriate to Israel.
In his memoirs, Ionesco wrote: “I know that the Jews have fertilized their (Arab. – A. G.) lands, a thing of envy to their neighbors, who themselves are unable to do so. I know that the “advanced” Arab regimes are not advanced at all, and that military circles and fascists rule over them. […] I am for the Jews. I chose this people. […] When everyone thought that there was no hope for Israel (during the Six Day War. – A.G.), I turned to an Israeli diplomat in desperation and asked what I could do to help. “I can do nothing but write an article in the paper,” I said. “It’s a lot,” he told me, “do it, everything is important. I wrote the article, printed it in the paper. Wrote another article. And I felt like I had done something. It was an effective action, not a particularly big one, but I did it from my heart.”
Eugène Ionesco was one of the founders of the famous “theater of the absurd.” The first play written in this genre, “The Bald Singer” (1950), was a product of his work. In Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros” (1959), people turn into rhinoceroses, into monsters. Rhinoceros describes the human degeneration that is mandatory for a totalitarian society and is shown as an epidemic of contagious disease of obversion.
Who was Eugène Ionesco? Why did he express pro-Israeli views, unlike his colleagues? Why did the French academic side with the Israelis in a war that even many Israelis consider a defeat? “Of course, I sympathize with Israel,” the playwright wrote, “perhaps because I have read the Bible, perhaps under the influence of my Christian upbringing or because Christianity is nothing but a Jewish sect.”
Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania, on November 26, 1909. The family moved to Paris in 1913. In 1916, Eugène’s father left his wife and two children and moved to Bucharest. In 1928 Eugène returned to Romania, where he graduated from the University of Bucharest. In 1938 he made an unsuccessful attempt to defend his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. He then returned to Romania, where he was caught up in World War II.
Ionesco had a Christian upbringing and grew up in a Christian environment, although he was born into a mixed family: his father was Romanian and his mother a French Jewess. Eugène’s father was a famous lawyer in Bucharest, the chief of police in the city, who adapted to the pro-Nazi and pro-Soviet regimes. He mocked his Jewish wife, accusing her of “contaminating Romanian blood”. Eugène accused his father of antisemitism and sided with his mother: “I don’t know why, but it determined my attitude toward my parents; and it determined my social hatred. I had the impression that it made me hate authority; this is the source of my resistance to militarism, that is, to everything that represents military power and a society based on the superiority of men over women. […] Everything I have done has, to a certain extent, been done against my father. I published critical articles against his homeland (my homeland is France for the simple reason that I lived there with my mother as a child, in my early years and because my homeland is only the country where my mother lived).”
In 1941, Ionesco was stuck in Romania, where Jewish pogroms were taking place. Despite his Christian faith and name, Ionesco had enough Jewish blood in his veins that he feared for his life. He filed a request to leave Romania for France and awaited his fate in terror: “Will I see France again next year? Will I return there or not? [… ] Will I still be alive next year? Free or imprisoned? Or will I stay forever in this place, always here?” Ionesco did go to France in 1942.
Life in Romania taught Ionesco an understanding of totalitarianism. This understanding distinguished him from many of his colleagues in the Western world. In “On the Anxiety of 1990,” he wrote: “To err is the destiny of those called intellectuals in France.” The mistake of his contemporary French intellectuals was that, like the leaders of the philosophical Frankfurt school, their main enemy was the Western state, which they perceived as repressive. The Frankfurters lacked the imagination to imagine that anti-civilization movements were more dangerous than the most imperfect democratic state.
Eugène Ionesco deeply understood the nature of totalitarianism and the nature of man under that regime: the same people, including his own father, faithfully served the fascist regime and later the socialist one. The “beastliness” shown in the play Rhinoceros is characteristic of fascism and of communism. Some European intellectuals were hostile to democratic regimes, including Israel, and considered them guilty of oppression, imperialism, aggression and colonialism. In contrast, Ionesco was hostile to the totalitarian regimes of Romania, Germany and the USSR, considering them many times more harmful and dangerous than Western democracies. He was critical of totalitarian regimes in the Middle East.
Ionesco learned the depth of the human fall from the example of his father, who unscrupulously rushed from fascism to communism. He saw his father’s zoological antisemitism toward his mother and sided with the persecuted and abused mother, with humanity against atrocity. He condemned and rejected the “turning into rhinoceroses” in his family. Ionesco’s unusual attitude toward Israel, toward the Middle East conflict, arising from his personal family tragedy and resulting from his knowledge of totalitarianism, alienated the writer from his peers. Unlike other intellectuals, Ionesco believed that “Arab regimes are not advanced at all and that military circles and fascists rule over them.” Ionesco perceived the blindness of the European Left, which did not notice the new fascists’ offensive against the Jews who had escaped the Nazis, as their “turning into rhinoceroses.”
Contrary to the opinion of his caste, the literary elite, he sided with the Jewish state, a country of refuge for a small people persecuted by totalitarianism and antisemitism. In his attitude toward Israel, Ionesco found himself alone, just as the hero of his play Rhinoceros, Béranger, found himself the only man among the rhinoceros-turned-crowd.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.