Village Voices

I was forty years old when I opened the Village Voice Bookshop in July 1982. Oddly enough, at no moment in my previous careers did I consider selling books as a plausible profession. This surprising leap of faith would undoubtedly put me out on a limb once again. But hadn’t I always listened to my instincts and taken the road not traveled when it came to choosing one direction over another in my earlier adult life? What mattered to me was the feeling that I was going forward, even tentatively, just out of reach of some elusive, ever-beckoning elsewhere.

In the immediate postwar years, children’s books were rare, yet there were plenty of stories floating around, and I enjoyed eavesdropping on adult conversations that intrigued me and teased my imagination. Recalling my early childhood, I see myself and my younger brother exploring our large garden in Nancy, my mother’s native city, or running through fields and farmlands during our summers in Brittany.

I was nine years old when we moved from Nancy to Saint-Brieuc, settling permanently in this small but lively port city on the northern coast of Brittany. We lived two steps away from our public high school, named after the author Ernest Renan, also close to the picturesque cemetery overlooking two valleys and the sea in the distance where Albert Camus’s father was buried. He was not even a year old when his father was killed in 1914 at the start of the First World War. Forty years later, accompanied by his friend, the writer Louis Guilloux, a native of our city, Camus visited his father’s grave. In his posthumously published last novel, Le premier homme, the author recalls how shaken he was at discovering his father’s birth date inscribed on his tombstone, realizing that the man lying in this grave was younger than his own son.

Mostly attracted to nature and outdoor activities as a child, I turned to music and dance in my adolescence, but it was books that truly filled my life. I never sought out stories written primarily for a young adult audience; rather, I was fond of documentaries shown in our ciné-club, and I dreamed about exotic ways of journeying in the real world. In my quest to live a life more intense than my own and even become another person, I read the books we had at home, mainly twentieth-century contemporary French authors. Among my favorites: Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Vercors’s The Silence of the Sea, and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausée put a name on what I felt to be my own existential malaise while Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical writings strengthened my resolve to be free, independent, and travel the world.

One day during my last year of high school, I had an unlikely encounter with a woman named Natacha that changed the course of my studies and the future I had envisioned. Born in Russia, Natacha had grown up amid the circles of the Russian immigration in Paris in the twenties and thirties. Perhaps intrigued by my curiosity, she offered to teach me her native tongue.
The Russian language was totally alien to me and not even taught in our public high school; however, as ancient Greek was part of my lycée curriculum, the Russian alphabet already seemed fairly familiar. On Saturday afternoons, I would walk across town to get to her place, excited by the prospect of learning her language by reading excerpts from Russian classics she had carefully chosen for our session. She would receive me in her living room gloriously walled in by shelves of books by Pushkin, Gogol, and the like, and we would sit at her table facing the bow window with a cup of hot tea, ready to dive into another world. Encouraged by her and the promise of the unknown, I decided to take up advanced Russian studies at the University of Rennes. Our Saturday afternoon ritual continued, and before long, I was speaking Natacha’s language.
In 1962, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the literary review Novy Mir—the first hint of Stalin’s gulags in postwar Soviet literature. It was a breakthrough moment that generated hope for a further easing of censorship. Khrushchev’s relative relaxation of repressive measures had made it possible for Natacha to trace family members left behind in Moscow more than thirty years beforehand. They became a surrogate family for me when I was completing my junior year abroad at the Moscow State University (1964–1965), inviting me to spend my weekends with them, a rare opportunity for a foreign student to experience their daily life from the inside.

Yet hardly a month after my arrival, Khrushchev was overthrown by Brezhnev, who immediately halted the attempts of his predecessor to open up the country. Repression of writers resumed with even greater intensity. This was not good news even at my modest level as before l left for Moscow, my professor of Russian literature had entrusted me with a letter for his friend, the writer Andrei Sinyavsky, to be delivered to him in person.

In January 1965, unable to reach him by phone for an appointment, I showed up at his door and was told the author “would not be available for a while.” Aware of his satirical critiques of Soviet society, I understood what this cryptic message really meant: Khrushchev’s Thaw was definitely over. Only when I was back in France would I learn about the trials of Andrei Sinyavsky and other writers of his generation, including the poet Joseph Brodsky. All of them had been sentenced to labor camps during my own stay in Moscow.

In 1966, now certified as a teacher, I taught Russian in Paris and Vannes. Yet the stagnation, repression, and nuclear threats of the Soviet Union during this ongoing Cold War period did little to encourage French students to embrace its language. Two years later, in August 1968, Soviet tanks invaded Prague. I found myself comparing this offensive with the 1940 brutal Nazi occupation of France. A year afterwards, I resigned my tenured position as a lycée teacher of Russian studies.
My experiences in the Soviet Union had only deepened my understanding of the complexities of the Cold War with its ever-growing tensions. Just as strongly, it had awakened in me a new interest in world affairs. I enrolled at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales that, back in the 1960s, trained translators and interpreters for international organizations. I was now looking at world events from a different angle, and given this new professional challenge, I decided that the time had come for me to discover the United States, the reigning world power and major rival of the Soviet Union.

In the fall of 1969, at the height of the Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, racial and feminist protests, and the recent landing of the first man on the moon, the eyes of the world were turned toward the US. In due time I left Paris for the university city of Amherst in Massachusetts where I had secured a small job, one of several to follow in the States.
It was, however, my Greyhound bus trips that led me to discover the diversity of this wide country. I took in breathtaking natural scenery from the East Coast shores to the stunning bays of California. But it was the scenes of desolation I stumbled on that marked me most, calling up passages from Richard Wright in Twelve Million Black Voices written thirty years earlier. One of these encounters took place just outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Straying from city limits, and quite by chance, I ran into a group of impassive Black men sitting on cinder blocks in front of a row of shacks. They seemed to be staring into a void; suddenly, a big, tough white guy with a rifle on his shoulder appeared out of nowhere. Shouting loud threats at me, he started to chase me away.

Such a foray into the heart of the country only increased my interest in racial justice, inspiring me to translate one of Michael Thelwell’s stories, “Fish Are Jumping an’ the Cotton Is High: Notes from the Mississippi Delta” (The Massachusetts Review, 1966). It describes a trip to the heart of “Dixieland” in the mid-sixties that revealed the huge gaps between the stark realities of the lives of disenfranchised Black peoples and the lingering image of the mythologized “Old South.” I sent my unsolicited French translation to Sartre’s review Les Temps Modernes, which published my work in 1971.

During this same period, a friend of mine, a French social worker versed in the successful methodology of the community activist Saul Alinsky (later a model for the young Barack Obama) asked me if I would help him translate Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Our Manuel de l’animateur social that included Jean Gouriou’s preface about his Chicago/Alinsky experience would come out with Éditions du Seuil in 1976.

As planned, I went back to France at the end of 1970 to complete the second and last year of business school. Then, out of the blue, I received an invitation to work as a translator for the major Algerian oil and gas company Sonatrach that had just opened an office in Washington, D.C. Its director was none other than the scholar who had led the Frantz Fanon seminar I had attended at U. Mass in Amherst. He had also been the first ambassador of independent Algeria to Washington, but, following his country’s diplomatic break with the US over a political disagreement, had stayed on in the capital to continue to work out a rapprochement between the two countries.

Algeria had an enormous potential of natural resources waiting to be fully developed, but in 1971 its relations with France were at their lowest. Sonatrach turned to North America to set up a working commercial and industrial collaboration: Algeria would sell the US its liquefied natural gas while the latter’s highly experienced industrial companies would participate in Sonatrach’s ambitious, large-scale development projects. I immediately accepted the unexpected but attractive offer this promising company held out to me, not unaware that Algeria was now enjoying leadership status among other aspiring developing countries. In fact, the seventies proved to be years of intense activity between our Sonatrach office and its host country. Riding the headwinds of international politics, the Algerian company had managed to set up a working partnership with the US. By the end of 1979, having met our original goals, Sonatrach closed its D.C. office.
The previous year, a family tragedy had awakened in me memories of childhood events I had been able to hold at a distance all this time abroad. Now, I was ready to go back home where I felt I was needed. Strangely enough, once there, these flashbacks continued to haunt me, including one in particular from my early years.

On August 3, 1944, I had just turned two in the small town of Corlay in the heart of rural Brittany. I clearly remember lying on the floor face down, squeezed between my elder sister and my baby brother. My mother was stretched out on top of us, her arms enfolding all three children. At eye level I could just about make out the sunbeams filtering through the shutters being hit by stray bullets coming from the fight outside between local Resistance fighters and occupying German soldiers. All of a sudden, there was a walloping bang at the door, and precipitously my mother stood up. I have no memory of what came next. Some time later, I was told that my grandmother Françoise had died that morning, but I must have been three or so before I began to grasp what had actually happened.

On that fatal day in August, after breaking through a Resistance defense line, a Gestapo division operating in the region forced two villagers to reveal the names of active partisans. Under death threats, they indicated the road to my grandmother’s café-restaurant called À la Descente des Courses (“Where the Races Meet”), a friendly gathering point for fans of Corlay’s famous horse races.

In fact, this much beloved woman had not hesitated to turn its basement into the clandestine meeting place of our nearby Resistance members. When the two hostages were brought there they blurted out, “C’est là que ça se passe” (“This is the place”). By noon, the Nazi soldiers had stormed and shelled the café.

Fighting in an area close by, my father did not arrive in time. When he did manage to get there, he had to face the utter chaos of the fierce battle that had just occurred. He was to discover two bodies on the café floor: those of his mother and her young friend, the pregnant wife of a fellow Resistance fighter. They were lying in a pool of blood, their faces riddled with bullets. The German officer who had ordered the assault was likewise dead. In an effort to check his identity papers, my father searched through the breast pocket of his uniform. There, he found the photo of a wife and child. At such a moment, he must have felt despair, but also a good measure of guilt. Be that as it may, he vowed to go and visit the officer’s family in Germany once the war was over. Three months later, my father was blown up on a land mine at la Pointe de la Varde (Saint-Malo). He never accomplished this journey.

These two dramatic events have always stayed with me, but buried inside. Yet I was never able to articulate how the loss of my father had actually shaped my values in life, including my deep and continued love of books.

One day, years later, in the middle of an interview I was giving, I had a vision of books burning in the middle of the street. This image jolted my mind as I immediately understood that these books set afire by the Gestapo had belonged to my father. Straight away I remembered my mother’s description to me of this very auto-da-fé in Strasbourg. This startling reminder would bring me face to face with the reality that my starting up a bookshop was not at all a random decision.
Rather, it was a way of bringing a luminous quality to the darkened piles of books once brutally tossed into the street. I could thus continue my silent dialogue with the father I had never known.

Throughout my thirty years at the Village Voice Bookshop, I realized that I had never felt more at home than among its books, each one with its own story to tell.

Well after the Village Voice Bookshop had closed, I found myself looking through hundreds of author transcripts and listening to just as many tapes. These voices were witty, jocular, even outrageous—a sign of the times that could only make me smile. They were testimonies to brilliant writings, steadfast friendships, beguiling loves, and bold, stylistic strands of beauty.
Nevertheless, I was unable to dismiss that these very voices also recreated in me a sense of loss and stirred the memory of losses suffered—be it through an exile or the erasure of personal history and identity; the estrangement from one’s native tongue and culture; the plundering of the natural world; the seemingly irreparable separation from loved ones. Inscrutably, these same voices gave me hope for three decades and continually reinvigorated the raison d’être of our long journey together in their affirmation of life.

When I close my eyes, I still hear them rising in ever-widening circles from our small, but cozy niche in the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.