Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
4 - Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Summary
‘And what's the name of this friend of yours who is coming this evening?’
In the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, the initial part of which is called Combray after the village where the protagonist's family has a country house and spends its holidays, the narrator tells us about his friendship as an adolescent with his Jewish schoolmate Alfred Bloch. We read the narrator's account of Bloch's visits to his family as a literary reflection on crucial elements in the process of Jewish assimilation in France.
The first two things we learn about the friendship between the protagonist and Bloch is that it is founded on long and high-flown discussions about literature, and that it does not last long. After a few visits, Bloch is not invited to the house again, although he was heartily received at first. In order to explain why his family's attitude towards Bloch changed, the narrator first recounts how his grandfather usually displayed peculiar behaviour upon receiving his friends. The grandfather subscribed to the theory that whenever the protagonist wanted to bring home a friend
that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he [the grandfather] would not have objected on principle – indeed his own friend Swann was of Jewish extraction – had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as friends were not usually of the best type (Proust 1996: I, 107; I, 90).
The narrator does not explain what the grandfather found objectionable about these friends. We do learn something about his expectations and norms by scrutinising the short performance with which he confronts the visitor in front of the protagonist. The narrator describes how, whenever a new friend entered the house, the grandfather would nearly always hum a tune:
Oh God of our fathers’ from La Juive, or else ‘Israel break thy chains’, singing the tune alone, of course, to an ‘um-ti-tum-ti tum, tra-la’, but I used to be afraid that my friend would recognise it and be able to reconstruct the words (Proust 1996: I, 107; I, 90).
By humming these tunes upon the visitor's entrance, the grandfather creates an atmosphere of invisible difference around Jewishness, which is simultaneously shared by both the protagonist and the guest.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of MulticulturalismFrench Modernist Legacies, pp. 137 - 164Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013