Mixité and the Post-War World

• In Event: Convergences: jewblack is blackjew

Abstract

It’s Paris, 1947. The city is exultant but in chaos, with the economy in shambles, a fiercely growing anti-colonial movement, and increasing resistance to the throng of GIs swarming its cobbled streets. Cecile Rosenbaum, from a bourgeois Jewish family, cannot reconcile the random forces that have permitted her to survive the Holocaust. Repulsed by French society, which she views as collaborationist, she begins an affair with fellow student Sebastien Danxomè. For his part, Sebastien is driven to outdo the colonialist society that has subjugated his home. He finds himself caught between the allure of Cecile and of Paris, and his duty to return to Africa, where his father, the King of Dahomey, expects him to take up the fight for independence. To Mack Gray, an African-American GI involved in the black market, success is measured by easy money and the trophy he’s vowed to bring home: a white wife, with whose blond hair he boasts that he will “mop up my momma’s floors.” But Cecile, whom he meets in a jazz club, turns out to be an Alice-through-the-looking-glass reflection of Mack himself. She is white but a minority, from affluence but oppressed, a witness to legalized terror and outraged as a result. When she becomes pregnant, the three must come to terms with the complexity of a world that is at once familiar and completely new.



My novel, What Is Hidden Cannot Be Loved, emerged from the letters between my grandmother and my mother, from 1955 to 1984. Focusing on an unlikely love triangle — between a Holocaust survivor, a colonial subject of France, and a black GI — WIHCBL moves from the seventeenth-century Slave Coast to occupied Paris to Civil Rights-era Kansas and explores the blurring, deliberate as well as unexpected, of cultural, racial and religious lines.

Author

• David Wright, University of Illinois