In 1926, Aron Beckerman, a Yiddish-speaking, communist Jew from Biała Podlaska, Poland, settled in Paris’ 20th arrondissement. Upon his arrival, he made women's bags during the day and worked as a journalist and writer at night. Beckerman was one of the estimated 150,000 immigrant eastern European Jews in interwar Paris. Arriving from different points across eastern Europe, Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Paris experienced a city unlike anywhere they had seen before – the boulevards, the smells, the sights and the numerous public displays of history were all new to many of those first setting foot on western European soil. Like many others, Beckerman tried to make sense of his new home. Unlike others, however, Beckerman had a means through which to disseminate his ideas on what Paris was and could be for Jewish immigrants: his journalism. By describing and defining Parisian history and urban locales in a variety of periodicals, he was instrumental in helping other immigrants understand, become acclimated and find community in Paris. Beckerman's writings illustrate how an eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jew created a vision of Paris for new immigrants that was based on a historical, urban and architectural understanding of their new place of residence. He kept one eye focused on eastern Europe and the Jewish experience from which he and others came; the other on Paris (which would at times stand in for France as a whole) and the emancipatory, revolutionary and republican values it represented, which he framed through an explicitly historical and urban understanding of the city.
Descriptions of Jews’ arrivals into Paris during the post-World War I period highlight the social and economic stratification and the different experiences had by a variety of Jewish immigrants. Roger Perelman, who was born to eastern European Jewish immigrants in Paris in 1933, says of his father's arrival in 1923 at Paris’ Gare du Nord, ‘My father was dazzled by the oranges sold by street vendors, which he bought immediately: the accumulation of these fruits, for such a low cost compared to Poland undoubtedly strengthened the idea that France was not only a country of freedom, but also a land of plenty.’Footnote 1 Israel Lilienstein, who immigrated to Paris from Warsaw in late 1923 and lived in ‘Jewish Belleville’ in the 19th arrondissement, recalls: ‘Belleville was a “Jewish” city in Paris.’Footnote 2 The 1930s saw some upward mobility. Of her situation, Renee Passe-Alfandary, born in Paris in 1932 to two immigrant Jewish parents, remembers that her family was upper middle class. They had a maid and a part-time governess.Footnote 3
Not all Jews had such a seemingly smooth transition, however. As Joseph Roth wrote in 1927, prior to moving to Paris in 1933, ‘It wasn't easy for Eastern Jews to make their way to Paris. . .But in Paris there is a great tradition of practical humanity. . .Paris is where the Eastern Jew begins to become a Western European. . .He becomes French.’Footnote 4 In spring 1933, David Szymin, later to be known as the photojournalist CHIM, wrote to his friend Ewa saying ‘Today is one year since I have arrived in Paris. . .many things have changed, I work, I run around, I see fascinating things, I am learning to know Paris, I am starting to be a part of it.’Footnote 5
Once the initial experience of arrival was over, immigrant Jews would have had to make sense of their new surroundings in order to earn a living and function in a city that was very different from cities they knew in Poland, Hungary, Romania and even Germany. This is unsurprising and could be applied to most, if not all, immigrant experiences in France and elsewhere. But by 1939, after, in some cases, decades of living in Paris, immigrant Jews had spun a far-reaching web that extended throughout both the Right and Left banks of the Seine as they continued to move and relocate to spaces in Paris beyond the Pletzl (little square) that formed the community's nucleus.Footnote 6 How can we understand this expansion, which seems to signify a comfort with their urban environs? Yiddish-speaking immigrants took a keen interest in defining their new surroundings in ways that would help situate Paris within both a ‘French’ and ‘Jewish’ framework, making the city easier to comprehend and navigate.Footnote 7 They did this primarily though journalism, which allowed some writers the opportunity to assert and transmit a vision of Paris as a historical centre of republican and revolutionary experimentalism, which could serve as a new hub of transnational Jewish cultural production.Footnote 8
Journalism helped tie the variety of immigrant eastern European Jewish communities and experiences together because of how some writers such as Aron Beckerman bridged seemingly irrevocable political and ideological divides. While the political communities that emerged in interwar Paris certainly played an important role in establishing some common ground among immigrants of a particular political ilk, the lines drawn between groups, as we will see, were not so concrete.Footnote 9 In Beckerman's journalism, Paris played protagonist in blurring those lines.
The interwar Parisian Yiddish world of letters, which comprised activists from all over Yiddish-speaking Europe, functioned within its own unique political, social and cultural framework. Whereas party politics seemingly dictated how ideas were conceptualized and disseminated within circles in eastern Europe, journalists in the western European transnational global Yiddish world, who have mostly been marginalized, understudied and largely forgotten within a variety of scholarships, played to traditional ideological binaries while seemingly deconstructing them. Aron Beckerman's journalism on Paris – its history, places and spaces – crossed political boundaries to create a wider-reaching communal understanding and identity.
But why and how, exactly, did Beckerman create and maintain balance among his interpretations of Paris as the seat of French universalism, a hub of anti-fascist and internationalist unity, and a home to a new type of western European, Yiddish-based Jewishness? As we will see, rooting these ideas in print and coupling them with visible places and spaces in Paris, creating what Peter Fritzsche has called a ‘word city’, enabled the textual and visual understanding needed to articulate this seemingly incongruent new identity.Footnote 10
In his writings, Beckerman sought to reframe and define Paris through a historical narrative that employed the literary tropes of defeat and rebirth to catalyse an understanding of Paris (and by extension France) as the capital of republicanism and revolution. Beckerman's narrative only comes to life, however, once it gets tied to places and spaces within the City of Light itself. In Paris, Beckerman wrote for, among some other international Yiddish-language news outlets, the Naye prese, the Yiddish-language communist daily, which ran from 1934 to 1939, the Ilustrirte yidishe prese, a Zionist-leaning Yiddish weekly illustrated news magazine, as well as the Parizer zhurnal, a Yiddish-language literary journal he helped found in late 1936.Footnote 11 He also authored books about the French poet and novelist Anatole France, the Yiddish dramatist Fishl Bimko, the Yiddish writer Borekh Glazman, and his literary idol, the Russian writer Dostoyevsky.Footnote 12 He was also active in collecting and sending materials to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna to help them catalogue Yiddish culture in Paris.Footnote 13 Beckerman's work for the Zionist weekly Ilustrirte yidishe prese (Illustrated Jewish Press) – a short-lived weekly illustrated newspaper published between 1934 and 1935 – is particularly worthy of critical analysis. His efforts to develop a Yiddish-language, communist-published guidebook for visitors of the 1937 World's Fair in Paris also stands out. These publications give further insight into how Beckerman attempted to transcend fragmented politics to create a more overarching communal French and Jewish identity. It is not surprising to learn that politics can feed a cultural agenda and how that agenda can drive a communal-building enterprise. However, what is surprising and telling about Beckerman's work is how he transcended political boundaries at times to fulfil an agenda seemingly focused on community building and based on cultural and historical understanding. For this communist, ideology did not always take precedence in trying to transmit identity.
Aron Beckerman stands as a unique and unexplored arbiter of urban, immigrant Jewish Parisian space. His Yiddish-language journalism attempted to define the historical, urban and cultural contours of Paris to his readers. Beckerman interpreted Parisian history through a lens focused on detailing a symbiotic relationship between defeat/rebirth and republicanism/revolution in order to make clearer the meaning of spaces and places within the city: all in order to establish a new French and Jewish sense of self. A focus on the prolific, yet forgotten, Parisian Yiddish writer and journalist Aron Beckerman makes it is possible to answer larger questions about immigrants’ receptions of their new host countries, and what a new, and in some cases first, urban experience for immigrants and migrants meant for the ways they constructed identity and community.
Historians David Weinberg, Nancy Green, Paula Hyman and Vicki Caron remind us that France was not simply a randomly chosen arrival point for Jewish immigrants. It was, for many, the European destination for eastern European Jews after pogroms swept the Russian empire in 1881 following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and antisemitism became state policy. After World War I, Russians, Poles, Hungarians and Lithuanians rushed to Paris in hopes of an unfettered political, cultural and economic existence.Footnote 14 These historians have laid the groundwork for studies on Jews in modern France, showing the importance of politics in evaluating this immigrant community in Paris, especially during interwar years. Adding an urban historical focus to these studies provides a clearer understanding of how Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in interwar Paris navigated the tensions that arose from trying to maintain simultaneously French republican and Jewish ethnic solidarities.Footnote 15 Beckerman's work shines a different light on this period, enabling a perspective that is as much about politics as it is about cultural productions and communal building and the myriad ways in which those social factors can interact with one another. For immigrant Jews in Paris, one of the avenues available to them for exploring immigrant identity was to learn about the city itself and know what it meant not only for French and, more broadly, European history, but how Jews themselves could appropriate aspects of Frenchness as seen in the streets and through architecture in Paris to engender a simultaneously universalist French and particular Jewish identity.
For Beckerman and many other Yiddish-speaking immigrant Jews in Paris, the universality that French republicanism represented was at the root of their support for France. It was also what spurred interest in cultivating Jewish culture as a means to coalesce a new eastern European Jewish form of community in post-World War I Paris. In a series of Beckerman's publications, we read of a city that defended itself repeatedly from attacks in order to maintain order and unity in a Europe fraught by years of turmoil. Defence and destruction are always followed by periods of rebirth and rebuilding in Beckerman's narratives. One reads of a Paris that, through its connections to the ideals of universalism and human rights, ought to fit naturally as a Jewish home. Beckerman created a spectacular modern reality of Paris through the use of newspapers to create a city that one can read while experiencing it.Footnote 16 Beckerman, in this regard, illustrates how immigrant Jews in Paris during the interwar period utilized cultural production to codify a communal identity that balanced Frenchness and Jewishness by way of a Parisian historical narrative centred on defeat and rebirth, culminating in a triumphalist description of Paris’ emergence as the capital of republican, revolutionary and universalist France.Footnote 17
There was a particular cultural and political context within which Beckerman found himself. He was a communist, but the dissemination of knowledge and literature to Yiddish-speaking Jews in Paris in the 1930s was seemingly his most important goal in helping people understand and navigate their new cultural, political, social and architectural surroundings. For Beckerman and other immigrant Jews engaged in creating a public Jewish culture in Paris through ‘institution-building, cultural enrichment, leisure, and self-edification’, the key to communal cohesion did not mean blind political adherence: it meant understanding one's history, and for the immigrant Jews of Paris of the 1930s, Paris’ history became their history.Footnote 18
Beckerman's reportage on ‘Paris in legend and reality’ in the Ilustrirte yidishe prese and his writings on the history of Paris in the 1937 publication Pariz: yidish hant-bukh: veg vayzer un firer (Paris: A Jewish Handbook and Guidebook (Pariz)) highlight the extent to which culture and education overtook politics as the means through which to codify a new communal identity – one that balanced notions of defence/defeat and rebirth with those of republicanism and revolution and tied these historical tropes to particular places and spaces in Paris. Analysing Beckerman's writings on the relationships between French history and public space within Paris shows how he was able to capture the concerns, questions and interests that this particular immigrant group may have had while trying to negotiate the parameters of their new French and Jewish lives.
French history for immigrant Jews in Paris
On 8 February 1935, Beckerman published the first in a series of columns on French history in Ilustrirte yidishe prese that focused on Paris as an enclave for cultural development and as the centre of European unity. To make these concepts clear to his reader, Beckerman chose Charlemagne, the ninth-century king of France, king of Italy and founder of the Carolingian empire (800–88) – typically regarded as foundational within the development of both French and German modern history – as his historical protagonist.
Beckerman used the story of Charlemagne to counter a typical either/or European historical trope, one that pits France, its culture, people and ideals, against German ‘barbarism’.Footnote 19 For Beckerman, Charlemagne represented a shared French and German historical heritage, which enabled an interpretation of European history through the lens of unity – the antidote to a barbaric, nationalist, German Kultur. Beckerman wanted to depict France, and specifically Paris, as a place where immigrant Jews could feel safe and as well as a place they ought to support because of a general French attitude towards cultural and religious tolerance.Footnote 20
Beckerman's first column is broken into five sub-sections titled ‘Charlemagne as emperor’, ‘Learning and knowledge’, ‘Love of art’, ‘The priest’ and ‘Lover of science’. In this first instalment, Beckerman describes Charlemagne as an emperor who tried to ‘assimilate all of the various people and races in his empire’, but once the attempt at assimilation failed, Charlemagne would turn to educating people in Paris in order to build a strong cultural base from which people could offset acts of barbarism.Footnote 21 Beckerman, writing for a Zionist publication in Paris, suggests that Charlemagne moved beyond trying to assimilate everyone within his empire.
Highlighting this component of Charlemagne's history strengthens Beckerman's stance that support for the French Republic can be simultaneously French and Jewish – a seemingly problematic notion given France's historical relationship to Jews’ status within the Republic as well as the contemporaneous refugee crises and the rise of antisemitism in France during the 1930sFootnote 22 – because of how it illustrates a component of French history, which favours education as the means to codify a citizenry. Beckerman then makes art and educational developments in Paris the focus of his narrative, highlighting Charlemagne's admiration of Byzantine art and how he spread culture throughout France quickly via its import. Accompanying this column is a picture of a police scene in Paris. The caption reads: ‘French students protest against foreign students.’ This protest, which took place on 1 February 1935, was a demonstration staged by the Camelots de roi (the youth wing of the right-wing, monarchist, nationalist and antisemitic Action française) against the envahissement des métèques (the ‘invasion of foreigners’, using the more derogatory term for ‘foreigner’, ‘métèques’, than the typical ‘étranger’). Reading the text, caption and image collectively makes it clear that Beckerman is utilizing Charlemagne as a historical and mythical trope to help define Paris – its history and meaning for a unified Europe – against the xenophobia of French nationalists. He is assuring his Yiddish-speaking immigrant readers that these student protests are in opposition to French (read: Charlemagne’s) multi-ethnic and multi-lingual tradition.
The second instalment of ‘Paris in legend and reality’ was published on 15 February 1935 and focuses on ‘Art in Charlemagne's time’. Beckerman wrote, ‘There was no general school of art. . .during Charlemagne's time. . .but a general style did exist. . .Charlemagne had settled in France and in Paris. . .[but]. . .Paris was not Charlemagne's residence. . .Charlemagne lived in Aix-la-Chapelle.’Footnote 23 After establishing Charlemagne as central to building educational and cultural structures in Paris in the first edition of ‘Paris in legend and reality’, Beckerman makes it clear that Charlemagne was not in Paris for most of his reign. A peculiar move by Beckerman, perhaps, but if one continues, it becomes clear why Beckerman highlights the folks-bildung of Paris, which, although centred on Charlemagne's efforts, did not make him an essential and central component of Parisian life and history. Paris itself was the main actor.
Paris is a familiar subject within the annals of urban history. It could be argued that Jewish immigrants during the interwar period were some of the first to define Paris from this intellectual and theoretical vantage point. Walter Benjamin, the oft-studied German-Jewish theoretician who lived in Paris between 1933 and 1940 dedicated these years to completing his study of les passages (the ‘Arcades’) in Paris.Footnote 24 In 1935, he would deem Paris ‘the Capital of the Nineteenth Century’ admiring the City of Light's kaleidoscopic nature and its centrality for the birth of the ‘modern’. Of Paris, Benjamin thought the streets created a sense of collective identity and self and the arcades were the pinnacles of the modern in that they combined both the internal and external in one space. Patrick H. Hutton argues that ‘contemporary urban life pulsed with change, but the arcades remained as monumental reminders of the early projects of modern capitalism, open to the cultural historian's scrutiny [and that] by studying them, Benjamin hoped to expose the attitudes that had inspired their making and to draw attention to their psychological effects on those who wandered within them’.Footnote 25
Discussions centred on Paris and questions of ‘modernity’ – however one may define the term – are entwined outside of the immigrant Jewish milieu, as well. Whether Paris is considered the ‘capital of modernity’, a space within which new cosmopolitan identities could be formed or a place that uncovers a social history of people's experiences, it is important to understand Paris as both a space and place that catalysed new social relationships and, as Aron Beckerman shows us, new urban relationships that were rooted in both immigrant experiences and a search for community.Footnote 26
Aron Beckerman's writings illustrate how immigrant Jews built relationships that were based on an interpretation of their new place of residence.Footnote 27 For some, modernity and an accurate understanding of space and place is tied to architecture and how city officials organize and plan cities. However, it is also clear that movement within a city helps construct narrative understandings of one's surroundings. Descriptions of places and actual encounters within those spaces work in tandem to create meaningful relationships with one's place of residence. For Beckerman, Paris symbolized change and potential. Instead of highlighting Paris as a symbol of universal modernity, Beckerman depicts actual public places within Paris to highlight an urban centre of modernity that was an actively open Jewish space. For Beckerman, Paris was not a symbolic reality; it was a lived reality.
During the interwar period, for immigrant Jewish communists, such as Beckerman, who wrote for the Zionists, highlighting French republican attributes fed directly into calls for internationalist anti-fascism. The third instalment of ‘Paris in legend and reality’ ran on 1 March 1935. It featured sections on the topics ‘Buying gold’, ‘A new attack on Paris’, and how ‘Paris defends itself bravely’. In ‘Buying gold’, Beckerman detailed how in 861 CE, when the Vikings attacked Paris again (this was the third time), King Charles the Bald (823–77 CE) reached a monetary agreement with the Vikings to halt the attack. Beckerman describes how Paris defended itself bravely in 885 CE during what is now known as the two-year ‘Siege of Paris’ by the Vikings, saying:
Instead of the small pirate bands, which up until now attacked Paris. . .an army of forty thousand men [the Normans] appeared, under the direction of Rollo and Siegfried. . .
The Normans who settled in [Normandy] eventually assimilated among the French population, forgot their own language, and adopted French. . .[ellipse in original]
This large army came down the Seine and Oise rivers, and the flotilla of one hundred ships loaded with war-machines, incendiaries, and contemporary tools of war. They pushed through the Seine, and on 24 November 885, they could be seen from Paris. . .
‘Paris’, declared Goslin to the enemy, ‘must defend itself as well as the remains places, and not assist in their destruction.’
Then came the response from the attacker: ‘You deny me entry, well then, we shall see how your walled fortifications withstand my war machines and the might of my soldiers.’Footnote 28
Given Ilustrirte yidishe prese's Zionist context, the seemingly anti-assimilationist tone of this piece is not surprising. Beckerman, however, was not a Zionist, thus complicating how we, and perhaps his readers, understand the journalistic context and imperative from which he wrote. In this story of Paris’ defence, the Normans – because of their Germanic Frank cultural identity – represent a corrupted, belligerent notion of Frenchness, one Beckerman felt Paris ought to defend itself against – both historically and contemporaneously (the pervious imagery of the students’ acts as an ‘un-French’ visual representation of a barbaric (read: Nazi or fascist) version of Frenchness). This pan-political, malleable and historical approach to interpreting the past was part and parcel of Beckerman's larger cultural and ideological outlook. For Beckerman, recognizing the effect that language has on assimilationist tendencies was an essential component of understanding history. Additionally, he was actively involved in the pursuit of Yiddish as a language of cultural production in Paris through the literary magazine, Parizer zhurnal, and, based on his works in Ilustrirte yidishe prese, he was clearly able to put politics aside in the name of communal building. Beckerman sought to develop a vision of French history that spoke to his desire to become ‘French’ as well as his want for a thriving Yiddish/Jewish culture in France. His narrative of the 885 CE siege of Paris highlights this intricate patchwork. It is with a sense of heroic triumph and camaraderie between church and state that colours Beckerman's story of how Paris defended itself bravely. Beckerman also adds an element of historical memory, saying, ‘this defence has not been forgotten’, implying that this history of defence and rebirth had a lasting impression on French society.Footnote 29
Defence and rebirth were the two key attributes buttressing this tale of Parisian history because of how these tropes glued the notions of republicanism, revolution and Jewishness to the city of Paris itself. In May 1937, Aron Beckerman co-edited Pariz: yidish hant-bukh: veg vayzer un firer (Pariz) a publication of Naye prese, the publishing arm of the Jewish section of the French Communist Party and the only Yiddish communist daily in western Europe in the 1930s.Footnote 30 The book features several sections dedicated to helping Yiddish speakers learn about Paris. It also highlights several public plazas in Paris such as Place de la République, the Arc de Triomphe, Place de la Concorde and Palais de Justice. It also includes a section titled ‘The history of Paris’.
Beckerman is listed as one of the three contributors to Pariz, so it is difficult to determine his exact role because the booklet lacks attribution, but, given the tone and style of writing, it is possible that Beckerman contributed to, if not wrote, the sweeping nine-page history of Paris.Footnote 31 The salient narrative features of Pariz's ‘The history of Paris’ are destruction and rebirth.
Beginning during the Roman period, the piece details the second destruction of the city in 725 CE, which leads into a discussion of how the city was strengthened and fortified in 925 CE. Another section details the burning of the Talmud in Paris in the mid-thirteenth century – the text describes how Jews during this period in Paris had to wear yellow patches. ‘For Jews’, reads the guidebook, ‘the pious king [St Louis (1226–70)] showed more intolerance and cruelty.’Footnote 32 This section is followed by a discussion of the building of the ‘terrible prison fortress’, the Bastille, and periods of religious war. The piece concludes with a description of how Paris strengthened itself, yet again, following a period of despair.Footnote 33 ‘With Henri IV, the reign of the Bourbon Dynasty began’, reads Pariz, ‘During this time, work on Pont neuf was completed and the Louvre was made larger.’Footnote 34
The final sections in Pariz's ‘The history of Paris’ describe the reign of Louis XIV and Louis XVI, the ‘Great French Revolution’ and ‘The Paris Commune’. The ‘History of Paris’ concludes with ‘Paris, which in its two thousand year old history experienced several stormy and bloody events, became stronger, reborn of its own ashes after each disaster, it was renewed, enlarged, and enriched. Paris follows its eternal way, moving forward towards its destination: to become the capital of a renewed and free France out of a renewed and liberated world.’Footnote 35 Here we see Beckerman correcting the lachrymose conception of Jewish history – a version of Jewish history that emphasizes moments of suffering – and placing Paris at the centre of that corrective. It is a version of history where although Paris experienced moments of turmoil, violence and oppression, the city inched its way towards establishing France as the capital of an emancipated Europe.Footnote 36
This focus on defence and rebirth transitions into a tale of republicanism and revolution in Beckerman's writings when his publications begin to focus more definitively on urban spaces in Paris. Of the public places discussed in Pariz, Place de la République, the Arc de Triomphe and Justice receive significant attention.Footnote 37 In addition to photos of each location, there is a lengthy description that details the history and significance of each place as it relates to French history. There is a particular focus on notions of republicanism and revolution within the description of these places. These themes helped to accentuate and codify the seemingly conflicted relationship among French universalism, anti-fascist and internationalist unity and Jewishness by rooting these ideas in specific visible places in Paris that all concretized these abstract cultural, social and political concepts. The concept of republicanism pins the narrative to France; the revolutionary component, while it alludes to French history, simultaneously ties the narrative to internationalist sensibilities. In their study of culture during the Popular Front era in France, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar claim: ‘City planning brings representation into contact with the lived city, since urban history speaks not only to intellectuals concerned with social relations but also to the average inhabitant preoccupied with just coping.’Footnote 38
The description of Place de la République in Pariz reads: ‘the colossal statue of the Republic. . .the huge Lion symbolizes the defence of universal suffrage, the bas-reliefs depict the most important historical moments in French history since the Revolution’.Footnote 39 The photograph that accompanies the text captures the enormity of the statue by including surrounding buildings as well as people near the statue. Marianne, the pre-eminent symbol of French republicanism, is prominently featured at the top of the photograph. While reading Pariz, the reader's gaze looks up towards her. In the classic pose of Marianne, one of her arms is reaching towards the sky. The description of the Place de la République accentuates French republican as well as revolutionary (both French and international leftist) history not only though its use of Marianne, but because of how it highlights the lion. It was near the lion in Place de la République that the Popular Front government held commemorative rallies against the violent right-wing demonstrations of 6 February 1934.
French republicanism is the focus of Pariz's description of the Arc de Triomphe. The guidebook tells the reader that the Arc was built over a 30-year span, and that Napoleon's remains were led through the Arc after his death as they made their way through Paris in 1840. What is most significant about the description, however, is not the reference to Napoleon, but to the Great War. ‘In 1919’, reads the text, ‘French troops triumphantly marched through the Arc after winning the war. Here you will find the grave of the Unknown Soldier.’Footnote 40 The text gives the readers several layers of French history, and the statements that focus on the war seem to be the most important within the context of making readers understand French republican history. This emphasis on the republican history when tied to the Arc de Triomphe and the grave of the Unknown Soldier could have also been read as a way to undermine the right-wing appropriation of this place during the late 1920s and through the 1930s. ‘The urban landscape, charged with such historical associations, reinforced the idea of Paris as the capital of modern revolution’, and during the Sacco-Vinzetti riots of 1927, claims historian Brooke Blower, ‘the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier [was] reinvigorated. . .as a premier rendezvous point for the right. . .[and it]. . .became a principal stomping ground for reactionaries throughout the interwar years’.Footnote 41 Colouring this space with a red, immigrant and Jewish twist had the potential to redefine the importance of the Arc de Triomphe for leftist, Jewish immigrant activists during the interwar years.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was not simply a space for right-wing commemoration, it was a site that captured and represented a specific moment in French national and universalist history. In Pariz, the Arc de Triomphe, located on one of the most recognizable boulevards in the world, is tied to World War I, and, in turn, to the battle of Verdun – considered the most important battle France fought during World War I on account of the tireless struggle put forth by citizens and soldiers to defend the Third Republic.
The republican narrative planted within the description of the Arc de Triomphe conjures notions of ‘regeneration’, which would have been further augmented by references to contemporaneous internationalist, anti-fascist struggle, namely the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).Footnote 42 Because Naye prese covered the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Madrid (November 1936) (whose slogan (‘¡No Pasarán!’ – ‘They shall not pass’) echoed that of the Battle of Verdun (‘Ils ne passeront pas’)), readers of Pariz would have perceived the Arc de Triomphe as a symbol of support for Paris as well as the defence of republicanism against fascism. For many French people during the interwar years, the Battle of Verdun was the symbol of the Great War. To reference ‘Ils ne passeront pas’ by way of ‘¡No Pasarán!’ captures a particular notion of French rebirth and republicanism during and after the Great War.Footnote 43 ‘The battle [of Verdun] had reaffirmed the strength and greatness which France has signally failed to demonstrate in the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War’, argues Ian Ousby, ‘It had shown, moreover, that these qualities [French republican values] came, as they always did, from the people. . .such was the vision preferred by the Republic, conforming to the idea of France it has always sought to nurture.’Footnote 44
The description of the Palais de Justice is based on a sweeping tale of French history. Again, the narrative is tied to a particular place, therefore furthering constructions of immigrant Jews’ understandings of their surroundings and inculcating a particular French and Jewish Parisian identity based on an urban experience. The description tells of when the palace was built, and that the Conciergerie was once attached to what still stands. Four hundred years of dramatic French history are covered in just a few sentences. The entry reads:
The large clock in the corner of the palace was built in 1370 by Charles II, this was the first large clock in Paris. The clock tower served to signal the slaughter over the Huguenots. One of these halls may be the very palace where Louis XIV proclaimed, ‘Le état c’est moi.’ It was also here that the revolutionary tribunal condemned the King [Louis XVI] and Danton – voices roared during his trial.
This sets the stage for ‘Palais de Justice’, which occupies the largest part of the Island. Sixteen hundred years of Parisian and French history in one of the most interesting historical places of Paris.Footnote 45
Following a possible cue from Beckerman's earlier work, Pariz sought to give its readers new understanding and look at the City of Light through a unique, dramatic and somewhat politicized historical lens focusing on a narrative of French history that seamlessly tied together notions of defeat and rebirth, historical tropes familiar within certain Jewish intellectual circles. These cyclical ideas were then reconstructed to augment a French republicanism that, within leftist circles, was tied closely to notions of revolution – both domestically French and internationally anti-fascist. In order to establish a potentially long-lasting foothold within the immigrant Jewish imagination of Paris, these conceptions were then tied specifically to particular spaces, places and architecture to concretize an urban French and Jewish immigrant communal identity. Defeat, rebirth, the Republic and revolution could be seen throughout Paris, wherever Jewish immigrants walked the streets either on their way to work or as they strolled getting to know their new home.
Conclusion
In 1935, Ilustrirte yidishe prese was renamed Pariz (no connection to the guidebook). Paris was emerging as an important Yiddish locale and, by 1937, had become a hub of transnational Yiddish culture.Footnote 46 Beckerman and his colleagues provided a means through which eastern European Jewish immigrants in Paris could forge an identity that was both distinctively Jewish and firmly rooted within French national history. For Beckerman, Paris played a fundamental role in providing the space from which Jews could develop this new multi-diasporic Jewish identity, which was based on their emphasis of Paris as a centre of rebirth, republicanism and revolution. As we have seen, Beckerman accomplished this by balancing and combining intricately defined and constructed meanings out of both French (with a particular focus on Paris as representative of France) and Jewish histories.
On 14 August 1937, the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion opened at the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne (International Exposition dedicated to Art and Technology in Modern Life – aka the 1937 World's Fair) in Paris. This was the first ever pavilion at a World's Fair dedicated to ‘modern Jewish culture’.Footnote 47 Le Populaire reported: ‘During a time where racism and antisemitism tends to flourish worldwide, the pavilion of Modern Jewish Culture takes the moral high ground.’Footnote 48 Naye prese said: ‘Here in the Trocadéro: the Eiffel Tower, pavilions of the press, of food, of Algeria – and we now find ourselves in the enormous International Pavilion nestled right up against our cultural pavilion. . .In each pavilion, you find a map. But these are maps of a country, from a region. In the Jewish Pavilion you find a world map.’Footnote 49 Later that year, in September, Beckerman was asked to represent his group of young Yiddish writers in Paris at the International Yiddish Culture Congress. His talk on behalf of Parizer zhurnal spoke of the need to develop an international society of Yiddish writers.Footnote 50
Paris’ defeat to the Nazis on 14 June 1940 would change and ultimately decimate Yiddish Paris. Beckerman, like many other leftist, Yiddish-speaking immigrant Jews in France, became active in the resistance.Footnote 51 On 6 March 1943, Aron Beckerman was deported from Drancy on transport no. 51 (via Gurs). He was murdered shortly after his arrival at Majdanek during the same year.Footnote 52 He was 46 years old.
Aron Beckerman loved Paris, and in 1946, he was remembered as a Parisian in a yizkorbukh (memorial book) titled Memorial Book in Memory of Murdered Parisian Yiddish Writers.Footnote 53 Beckerman was a passionate Jewish immigrant activist and seemed to write, for among other reasons, to help engage new arrivals to Paris and define for them French history and historical settings within the city. Beckerman made it clear that history was an important component of Paris’ make up. His emphasis on republicanism and universalism made it clear that within a Jewish immigrant context, Paris could stand as a Jewish home. If Paris was attacked, it would rebuild itself. It saved itself from Vikings, Barbarians, Germans and even itself. Then, through its commitment to republicanism, Paris became the capital of a liberated world. It was the place where immigrant Yiddish-speaking Jews could support French Republican and universalist ideals, struggle against fascism and advocate a particular sense of Jewishness built upon the idea that, just like Paris, the Jewish community could change, rebuild and integrate itself simultaneously into both domestic and international struggles.
