I loved this book. It made me cry, think, and once, I even threw it down saying, “This is bullshit.” (Caron uses the word shit quite a bit, so if it offends, I'd turn back now.) The book is framed as a father–son meditation between the elder Caron, who during the writing of this book is near death, and it is the father's mortality that finally makes him a subject worthy of his son's attention.

David Caron's book is part of an emerging genre of part-scholarship, part-memoir that one might call “the familial is theoretical,” echoing the earlier wave of feminist work, in which the personal was political. The author of this emerging genre in Jewish cultural studies is, well, Jewish (as is the parent!), and the parent is quite old. The story often has something to do with the Holocaust. The child wants to engage the parent to learn more about the past. As with Caron, this yearning for connection is often triggered by family photographs, which have become the hot new objet d'analyse in cultural studies. If the narrative began and ended with photographs and family stories, there would be nothing scholarly about these deeply personal works, which reflect the new fascination among Ashkenazi Jews with their families' histories. Whether this has to do with being two generations beyond the Holocaust or one generation further removed from mythic Eastern Europe, family history and Jewish genealogy are a near cottage industry. It should not be surprising that Jewish scholars are also engaged in this project. (Full disclosure: there is a book self-published by my father, with his mug shot, mine, and my grandfather's on the back, that tells the story of my grandfather's life back in Ukraine with a witty, smart, scholarly introduction by none other than yours truly.)

Caron's engagement with his father launches him into a sophisticated, smart, and at times frustrating theoretical engagement with the very idea of community, of multiple people who think they have something in common coming together. Caron rejects the notion that community reflects some kind of sameness of identity between its members. Instead, he argues for the “queerness of community,” as in the book's title, in which community constitutes individual identity, not the other way around. He also suggests that community develops through rupture and crisis, not initially through connection, which only comes after the rupture. It is not surprising that for Caron, communities are constituted through crisis, as the two communities he focuses on are the two that occupy the Marais—Jews and queers, each of which was ravaged by crisis, out of which new senses of community were formed.

Caron provides the reader with a brief history of the place, of the quarter called the Marais that for centuries had been a place of Jewish residence in Paris. He discusses how after the Holocaust, the Jewishness of the place was a mixture of living Jews and ghostly presence. His father occupies a middle ground between the two as a Holocaust survivor from Eastern Europe who only spent time as a Jew in the Marais after the war. He then traces the transformation of the run-down neighborhood into a chic gay quarter, with the first seedy gay bars opening in the 1980s and then with the commercialization of the area in the 1990s. In between, he talks about how AIDS turned the gay community of the Marais into ghosts, just like Vichy and the Nazis turned the Marais's Jews into plaques on walls throughout the quarter. Caron uses the neighborhood as a backdrop for many layers of cultural critique—of the commodification of queer culture, of the hegemonic discourse of the family that has made his queer community of friends and fuckbuddies yearn to look like a heteronormative family. Caron clearly yearns for the queerness of community that he experienced in the queer culture of the 1970s and 1980s, both before and during the AIDS crisis.

I had often wondered why so many visible AIDS activists and writers, especially those who used Holocaust metaphors to describe AIDS, were queer Jews themselves—people like Larry Kramer or Harvey Fierstein. Caron shows that this was not an American phenomenon, as many of the early French AIDS activists and writers were queer French Jewish men. Caron suggests that the Jewishness of these activists, who lived with a post-Holocaust notion of community, understood the “queerness of community.” They used the metaphor of the Holocaust in the context of AIDS not as a means of comparing the two tragedies, but as a call to the listener to hear the potential for creating community out of crisis. It is a brilliant piece of cultural analysis, one of many in the book.

Caron's personally ruptured relationship with his father, which ultimately builds community between them, is embedded in the power dynamics of the French republic and its ideology, which is the target of Caron's most damning criticism. He hates the French Enlightenment's demand for universalism and its concurrent ideological hatred of community itself. This is a political culture that sees any form of public collective identity as a threat to Frenchness (thus making Jewishness and queerness both threats to French identity). Caron's whole being is, in some ways, a rejection of this notion of Frenchness, as he embraces difference as that which defines community. In Caron's reading, both difference and community are anathema to French civil society. His embrace of difference is also a rejection of his father's own yearning to be French.

The book opens and ends with Caron and his father wandering the Marais, each engaging differently with the ghostly presence of marginalized communities. Caron sees the Jewishness of the place only through the lens of ghosts, through aging stores and memorials to Holocaust victims, and presumes that his father does not see the real present of a visible commercialized gay community that has taken over much of the area. (His father, of course, sees the gay community.) Caron laments their generational divide, and it is this lamentation that generated community (and the book).

But I'd like to open up one last generational divide, the one between the author, a French queer Jewish man, who was queer in the age of AIDS, and his reader, an American queer Jewish man, who was queer after AIDS, and who got married to his husband. My experience of the Marais in the 1990s was not laden with family baggage, nor did I yearn for an underground, subversive queer culture that I never experienced. My Marais was also not about the distance between the Jewish and the queer. It was 1998, the same year Caron wandered the Marais with his father and got the idea for this book, and I was dressed to hit the gay bars. It was Christmas/Hanukkah time, and as I wandered along Rue de Rosiers, who approached me? Not a sexy gay man trying to pick me up. It was a Chabadnik, maybe twenty years old, who approached me asking, “Vous êtes juif? [Are you Jewish?]” Laying tefillin and having a drink in a gay bar just a few steps away, and all in one night—my kind of Marais.

Yes, the worlds of Caron and his father may have given way to a commercialized culture that has turned Judaism into a rote public display of ritual observance and queerness into a demand for equal rights (how banal), rather than for the lascivious pleasure of sex and community in a public toilet (a subject Caron spends quite a bit of time talking about). But here's the thing … I don't yearn for a time passed when Jewishness and queerness were acts that needed to take place in private. And perhaps that realization represents the next stage of community, perhaps less queer than Caron would like, but certainly one that has proclaimed power over place in ways unimaginable fifty or sixty years ago.