Bar-Cochebas, notre honneur
Bar-Cochebas
Jerome and Jean Tharaud
OUR HONOR
to the memory of the great Bernard-Lazare Tharaud and Peguy
The old Palestine, sacrificing sheep to Yahweh, what a figure of granite, compared to him, so subtle, so mobile! ISRAEL ZANGWILL
It is a baroque task to explain La Fontaine or Le Neveu de Rameau to exotic brains. I came to know the vanity of such an enterprise during the stay I made as a lecturer at the University of one of those dreary capitals of the Middle Danube region where life is so dull that one can only choose between women and despair.
Certainly it was not my compatriots who could have defended me from boredom out there! A Frenchman abroad is a faded Frenchman. Nothing is drearier than those poor devils whom harsh necessity has forced to expatriate themselves and who live in regret, irritation, and bitterness, full of a disdainful pride, often unjustified, toward the surroundings in which they find themselves. If, perchance, one of them makes his fortune, then he presents the image of such complacency, such absolute incomprehension of everything that is not French, he shows himself so devoid of grace, so inhospitable toward his less fortunate compatriots, that the most elementary wisdom commands one to flee him like a civilized man turned barbarian once more.
As for the students I taught, although they showed a fairly lively taste for things French, their warlike and politicking temperament, which finds its most natural outlet in the army or in government offices, disposed them poorly to receive our culture.
Only the Jews — and they were numerous at the University of B… — showed any ardor for thought. Coming from the hells of Russia and Romania, this city is for them the first relay where they catch their breath. They rest there, take the wind, adapt themselves to the European manner, shed a little of the old man. The boldest among them then continue their route toward Milan, Munich, Paris, London, driven by a desire for wealth, culture, freedom, neurasthenia, the eternal need to change place and house, a vagabond instinct, and, to say it all, the soul of the Wandering Jew. They play out there in intellectual life their historic role of intermediaries between West and East, peddlers of sentiments and ideas. I singled out one of them as the most accomplished type of this spiritual brokerage.
His curiosity extended from the tragedies of Racine to the songs of those Uralo-Altaic peoples who live in the tundra of northern Siberia on fish, reindeer milk, and seal fat. But I believe he would willingly have given his linguistic erudition, which was prodigious, to know how to hold a fork properly.
Often at night I would accompany him to the ghetto where he inhabited a miserable room furnished with a divan and a trunk, on the walls of which he had written in charcoal this motto that summed up for him the entire history of Israel since the Diaspora: “We shall not submit.” Nowhere have I felt such an impression of exoticism, of displacement, of remoteness… In a tone where it was hard to tell the playful from the serious, he told me he had chosen this sordid quarter, though he had a palace in Venice and a hotel in Vienna, in the quarter near the Burg, in order to live as innumerable people of his race had lived through the centuries, in suspicion and foul odors.
He experienced a sort of voluptuous pleasure in listening to the music of our language. One day he confided to me, with childlike enthusiasm, the pleasure he would have in hearing men’s and women’s voices alternating, “for,” he told me, “that is especially beautiful when your voices blend.”
I promised him this pleasure.
I had found in the house of M. L…, our Consul General, along with the furniture, the cuisine, and the wines of France, that superficial and nimble wit, that knowing ignorance which sometimes makes a simple man of the world among our countrymen one of the most elegant specimens of humanity. I begged him to invite my student to dinner. He began by balking (a Jew! In his house!); but I vigorously pointed out to him that the spectacle of a man who wished to exchange for ours the soul that the centuries had fashioned for him was, when all was said and done, the most original spectacle this country could offer us. It was agreed that I would bring him my Semite the next day for dinner.
When I communicated the Consul’s invitation to my friend, he thanked me with an effusion that went so far as hand-kissing, but that very evening he burst in upon me and declared he could not accompany me. I had no trouble guessing the reasons for his refusal: he dreaded being ridiculous. After an hour of battle I convinced him to follow me.
We found at the Consul’s a few Frenchmen passing through. The impression my Jew produced on them, and particularly on the women, I had too well foreseen to be distracted by it. But when we were once more in the street:
“Well?” I asked him.
“Ah! Herr Professor,” he answered me in German, “it was an infernal pleasure!”
I recognized from these words that he had reached the extreme limit of enthusiasm, the point where, French words failing him, German vocables rose irresistibly to his lips.
With a subtle instinct for elegance, surprising in an adolescent so utterly devoid of grace, and that deep voluptuousness by which in every Jew the Orient reveals itself, he analyzed for me the smallest gestures and the nuances of voices. The seduction had been so strong that this man of very rare culture had not noticed that the most absolute silliness had not ceased for an instant to inspire the conversation of my amiable compatriots; but he had felt their disdain, and he confessed to me that rather than endure such an ordeal he would prefer to live his whole life in the tundra of the Voguls. Then, to raise himself in his own eyes and in mine, while along the frozen Danube the wind blew in our faces the dust of snow and ice it swept from the river, he delivered to me in that bitter night the proudest, the most fantastic portrait of the history of the Jews, from Jesus to Karl Marx, a passionate monologue of which I have kept one of those grandiose and sterile impressions that go to join our dreams…
At the moment of parting, he flung at me by way of farewell the name of the man who symbolized for him the indomitable revolt of his race, the supreme convulsion of the Semite under the sandal of the Roman, the last Messiah, the last Jewish hero: Bar-Cochebas! — which made two little prostitutes, who were dancing a few steps away to keep warm, burst out laughing in the snow.
Years later, I left those Danubian regions, and in my memory the face of my Jew was blending with the yellowed features of those young rabbis one sees amid objects of copper and gold in the depths of Rembrandt’s synagogues, when I received this letter:
“Dear Herr Professor,
“Do you still remember your former student Bar-Cochebas? I left the University a year after you yourself departed, for my scholarship was not renewed and my resources were insufficient to prolong my stay. I have therefore returned to D…, more precisely to a small nearby village where my father keeps an inn. These inns of the Plain, they evoke for you, sir, only pleasant memories; you have heard there, when the lamps are lit, our admirable songs, and the violin, and the cymbalum of the gypsy. Ah! It must be delightful to be here only a traveler and a passerby! But you lived long enough among us to know what a Jew is in our villages, how indispensable and hated the tavern he invariably opens there. There lies the alcohol and there too the usury, and there goes the peasant’s money. My father is one of those Jews. He is miserly, pitiless, cowardly, and greedy. He repulses even me… Low as he has fallen, can I suffer him to be beaten and insulted? A revolver is on my table. It is the instrument you invented for settling affairs of honor. You cannot imagine how heavy it weighs in the hand of a Jew! In the room where I write to you, I hear blows and insults falling on my father, and I say to myself: ‘Strike, strike!’ and I remain seated at my table: I would avenge myself in vain! In this plain and in the course of time, would a revolver shot have more resonance than a cap that a child explodes between two stones? Only, with this way of looking at problems, one is condemned never to act. You, I imagine, would hesitate less. Ah! ideas exercise a frightful tyranny over me. Would that I had the courage to abandon myself to instinct! But what would I be, sir, if I ceased to be intelligent?… I have reread your tragedy of Le Cid because, from the analysis you gave of it at the University, I remembered that it posed a case of conscience not without analogy to my own. Rodrigue and Bar-Cochebas! The coupling of these two names is laughable. Everything that Rodrigue does seems to me simple, easy, natural, in accord with his country. But after all he is a barbarian, a man without culture and unreflecting… I admire him as one admires a fine weapon, a fine morning. Between him and me, nothing in common. As for the two old men who insult each other for a reason whose silliness confounds me, they understand each other; they feel offenses in the same way; they have the same idea of honor; the soul of the insulter could just as well inhabit the body of the insulted. But between my father and these peasants there is an abyss that all the centuries have dug. We Jews did not wish to merge with the nations, we refused to be alike! In this will not to submit, is there not enough to defend us from contempt? Can peasants understand that? Does my father himself still feel the nobility he holds from his race and which the abjection into which he has fallen does not touch? Is he sensible to any pleasure other than that of piling up kreutzers?… It is all the same profoundly regrettable that we should have raised toward heaven the most sublime cries of justice that humanity has ever heard, only for a filthy drunken peasant to come and spit in my father’s face without being punished… Would I not be ridiculous brandishing the sword of Rodrigue amid so much unconsciousness? It seems to me, however, that if I had that courage, I would thereby show you that I have well understood the meaning of the explanations of Racine and Corneille that you gave us at the University. You will tell me: ‘Flee that inn.’ Is that a solution? When I am in Vienna or Paris, my father will be no less beaten… A piece of advice, I beg you; the decision you indicate to me will be strictly followed here.”
The letter ended with compliments of an entirely Oriental hyperbole.
I immediately pictured the grassy steppes where troops of horses gallop, the tall gallows-frames of the wells, the houses lined up along the dusty tracks like the tents of a camp, the immense plain whose entire life is in the sky, and in that desert scorched by the dog days, the distress of my friend.
I replied at once:
“Certainly not, my dear friend, do not brandish the sword of Rodrigue! And the revolver is no more appropriate. Leave in peace all the peasants of the Plain. I know them a little; they are good and likable drunkards. And as for your father, why disturb with a useless and dangerous scene a situation with which he seems to accommodate himself perfectly well? Pack your bags at once; leave that inn where, when all is said and done, it is neither your race nor mine that finds itself in conflict. Intelligent men like us form a separate species in the world. Nothing is more foolish than to exaggerate certain family feelings. The Cid, whom you seem to picture as the symbol of French honor, is a young Spanish brute — not without beauty — but upon whom you could not model yourself. You yourself have found the reasons. Take care not to place your precious brain in the hands of the gendarmes for having laid out before his glass of wine a coarse peasant — and this to defend the honor of your father, who will be far from grateful to you and whose shop you will have shut down. Intelligences of your kind are too rare in your country for you to expose yourself to the prisons of Franz Joseph. If I have any advice to give you, here it is: I imagine that in the roughly twenty-five years your father has been engaged in commerce, he must have amassed substantial savings. Try then to discover the corner where he hides this hoard; abstract from it the money necessary for a trip to Paris; add to it the small sum that will allow you to live here while waiting for an employment to be found for you. I am assured that there exist at the Bibliotheque nationale some Manchu texts that await you. On your way, then! my dear friend. Tear yourself away from your nightmare and from the mirage of your burning puszta. On your way, and see you soon!”
My friend did not reply; I sent him a second note which likewise remained unanswered. I then wrote to the consul to ask him to inquire of the authorities of K… about his guest of a day.
I then learned the following:
The people seated in the village inn saw my friend enter one evening, revolver in hand. He aimed it at one of them, but at the moment of firing, seized by some unknown scruple, turning his weapon against himself, he blew out his own brains.
The amiable consul added:
“The end of your friend does not surprise me. When these Jews are not the most abominable scoundrels, they reach those high regions where the terrified bourgeois no longer inscribes his maxims. There was no doubt in your friend Bar-Cochebas a spark of the fire that animated the Prophets, but the poor devil died for having wished to throw upon his Jew’s smock the livery of our honor.”
JEROME AND JEAN THARAUD