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To the Editor:

I would like to comment on Nidra Poller’s article, “Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate’s Lament” [March], which I read with both sorrow and indignation. Nidra Poller, who has lived in France for a number of years, describes my country in a way that no doubt owes more to her imagination as a novelist than to reality itself.

At no point in the article did I recognize the France that I serve with pride, and where my family chose to live in circumstances similar to those of Nidra Poller’s own family. While it is true that anti-Semitic acts have been committed in France, I cannot accept her allegation that “Jews are being persecuted every day in France,” or that the French authorities can be accused of remaining silent. Nothing could be further from the truth, particularly when one is familiar with the commitment of the French president and the government to fight against all forms of racism and anti-Semitism, and when one observes the notable decrease in anti-Semitic acts. This is something that is recognized by all persons of good faith, from the president of Israel to the head of the Anti-Defamation League, both of whom have recently paid visits to France.

But did Nidra Poller really wish to demonstrate good faith? One might doubt it after reading certain passages of her article that verge on extremism (“We are not free in France”; “the Republic is under siege [by Muslims]”; “France is in fact an adversary of the United States”) and an astounding xenophobia, as when, describing the French people’s “cowardice,” she writes “they disgust me” and even calls on America to “come over here and colonize this place.” In France, we have a saying that “what is excessive is insignificant,” and perhaps I should have ignored Nidra Poller’s article for that reason. But when an article smacks of racism, I feel I have no choice but to respond. I am astonished that such a piece was published in your magazine, which is dedicated to combating such a scourge.

Jean-David Levitte

Ambassador of France

Washington, D.C.

 

To the Editor:

Reading Nidra Poller’s article, I ask myself whether I am the victim of a hallucination. It must be so, since her essay bears no relation to reality.

Anti-Semitism does indeed exist in France; to be precise, it is an Arab anti-Semitism, which has also turned into a more generalized anti-goyism (the goy in this case being the ordinary Frenchman). The phenomenon is very serious, but its dimensions are nothing like what one would imagine from reading Nidra Poller’s apocalyptic scenario. Publication of her article in a distinguished journal like Commentary is unfortunate; nourishing such fantasies serves the interest neither of the United States nor of the Jewish people, not to speak of France and Europe.

Alain Besançon

Paris, France

 

To the Editor:

I sympathize with the sentiments of Nidra Poller, but her account seems to me too darkly colored, a result perhaps of her experience living in the Parisian hothouse of the French elite.

My own experience of France, traveling and staying, goes back over 50 years and includes all parts of the country. Though I too have encountered the knee-jerk hostility described by Nidra Poller, it is not unanimous, even among the French elite. Jean-François Revel recently published a book condemning anti-Americanism, and the scholar Philippe Roger has published a superb account of the phenomenon’s history in France, dating all the way back to the 18th century.

In those days anti-Americanism took the form of a firm belief that the New World was, among other things, a poisonous land in which all the inhabitants were stunted, hermaphroditism was commonplace, and syphilis was contracted from eating iguanas. These were the ideas not of eccentrics but of respectable figures like Voltaire and Diderot. Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador to France, used the occasion of a dinner party to expose this absurdity. After steering the conversation around to the subject of the supposedly “stunted” growth of Americans, he asked everyone to stand up. The Americans towered over the Frenchmen and especially over the Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, who had been industriously spreading these cockamamie ideas. Raynal was not at all embarrassed; he dismissed the incident as “vulgar empiricism,” which in no way refuted ideas held by all the great minds of Europe.

The present form of elite anti-Americanism took shape during the 19th century, and was fixed in its expressions by the time of World War I. The hostile rhetoric used against Bush, Reagan, and other American presidents is essentially a recycled version of remarks made about Andrew Jackson. Plus ça change.

As for my own experience, I have never much cared for Paris, where the sort of sneering described by Nidra Poller is thick in the air. But in my extensive travels in la France profonde, I have, with rare exceptions, consistently encountered a deep and abiding warmth toward America, its culture, and its people. This is expressed both in personal friendships and in the astonishing kindness and helpfulness of complete strangers.

Herb Greer

Salisbury, England

 

To the Editor:

If Nidra Poller is looking for a country that is not “so vast I haven’t the faintest idea where I would put myself,” a country where it does not snow much, where the housing is more affordable than in New York and people do not firebomb synagogues or trash America, she is overlooking an obvious option. Sorry, but I cannot do anything about the shopping malls; we have them here, too.

Michael Gerver

Raanana, Israel

 

To the Editor:

Please let Nidra Poller know that she is welcome in Atlanta. My wife and I would be happy to put her up until she’s back on her feet. My wife is originally English, I am originally Irish. Though we both are now thoroughly American, we come with a squadron of Russian, Bulgarian, French, Spanish, Italian, and French friends, so she will even have a European ambience.

Patrick Carroll

Atlanta, Georgia

 

 To the Editor:

The trajectory of Nidra Poller’s life is exactly the reverse of my own. She left the U.S. in 1972, at the time of the Vietnam war, because she was sick of American “imperialism” and attracted by the “intellectualism” of the French Left. I left France in 1981, at the beginning of the Mitterrand years, because I had been disillusioned by the very same spirit of the French Left and saw in the “American dream” the cultural matrix for greater personal achievement.

Yet these two opposite trajectories have left us in the same place. Thirty years later, shocked by the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and particularly in France, Nidra Poller is considering a return to the U.S. As for me, having spent a quarter-century here as a resident alien, I finally took the oath and became an American citizen. The reasons for our respective decisions seem quite different, but when we look at them more carefully, they are related.

As I explained in a recent article in the French journal Commentaire, there were many reasons for my voluntary change of nationality, but they can be summarized under a single heading: the apathy and complete lack of solidarity in French society. The French care for only one thing—their individual welfare and comfort.

Consider what has become one of the main expressions of the exception française: the national penchant for going on strike. One may think that all these people marching and chanting in the streets of French cities are passionate and generous progressives, struggling for the improvement of collective life. But the reality is quite different: they are struggling only to keep everything in place, to preserve their own so-called avantages acquis (“acquired benefits”). The strikers’ only passion is for the status quo.

Regarding the anti-Semitism described by Nidra Poller, the French behave in the same way. I do not consider French nationals to be more anti-Semitic than their European neighbors. With a Muslim community in France of five million, anti-Semitism there inevitably feeds on international events. According to official statistics, one act of anti-Semitic violence occurred in 1998, nine in 1999. At the end of September 2000, after Arafat launched the second intifada, the number jumped suddenly to 116, and then it increased again after 9/11.

How did French public opinion react to these hate crimes? With indifference, by looking the other way. The hatred and persecution of the Jewish community go unnoticed by the French as long as it does not disturb their daily routine and comfort. This attitude of laisser-faire is not new; it is the same as the one that permitted the Vichy government to collaborate with the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Another component in this special brand of anti-Semitism is directly connected with anti-Americanism and concerns France’s continuous mourning for its past “grandeur.” In the French psyche, Israel and America are seen as states with messianic visions, as contrasted with France’s inability to project an ambitious future for itself, laying bare the secondary role France now plays on the international stage. In France, apathy and nostalgia are two sides of the same pusillanimity.

I regret that I cannot fix Nidra Poller’s shattered French dream. But her account reminds us that even when history does not accommodate our romantic mirages, it is never too late to take the future back into our own hands, and to build it again.

Jean-Michel Heimonet

Catholic University

Washington, D.C.

 

 

Nidra Poller writes:

Let me begin in reverse order by thanking Jean-Michel Heimonet most warmly for his endorsement and his very instructive amplification of my argument, and Patrick Carroll and Michael Gerver for their kind offers of hospitality. After reading my confession—a serial expatriate, an unregenerate gadfly—it takes courage as well as generosity to think of letting me come and live in your town.

I agree with Herb Greer that Paris is sometimes the capital of sneer, but I did not have the luxury of pursuing my career elsewhere in France. Besides, although I have roots in the Midi, and although I am the last to deny the joys of Mediterranean light, the sad fact is that things have changed there, too. José Bové has done his work, and the phenomena I describe in my article are to be found not just in the capital but in the provinces. As I hope I made clear, however, the hostility is directed not so much at individual Americans or Jews as at “the enemy,” those world dominators, the plotting Elders of Zion and the looming, God-fearing U.S.

Mr. Greer’s delicious anecdote about Benjamin Franklin leads me from one witty ambassador to the humorless letter by another and rather different ambassador, Jean-David Levitte. Not that Ambassador Levitte is necessarily humorless himself; I can easily imagine the job description that he has been assigned to fill. Still, I am a little embarrassed for la France, hitting me with the full, awesome power of the Foreign Ministry. But so be it.

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