‘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

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:

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.