Claude Sarraute: A Disobedient Daughter

By Benjamin Ivry May 3, 2010

The French Jewish journalist Claude Sarraute, 82, is the daughter of the noted Russian Jewish novelist Nathalie Sarraute (born Natalia Tcherniak). A new memoir from Éditions Plon, “Before You Forget Everything!” explains how Sarraute consciously avoided following in her mother’s footsteps.

The elder Sarraute was the author of abstract, sober philosophical narratives such as “Do You Hear Them?”; “The Planetarium”; and “Martereau,” which many French literati admit to finding incomprehensible. By contrast, Claude Sarraute has made a career out of writing humorous articles for French newspapers, and droll books like “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît” (Please, Miss!), about department store salesladies, which she researched by actually working for three months at Paris’s Galeries Lafayette.

As Ann Jefferson persuasively argues in “Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference,” the elder Sarraute’s consciousness of being different as a Russian Jew in France influenced her work. Although defiantly populist (and popular), her daughter Claude also retains an element of otherness. Claude always wears a Star of David in memory of wartime persecutions — as a bubbly adolescent, she was suddenly snubbed by her classmates after the German invasion. After the war, she took her vengeance, she notes, by “openly flirting with all the boyfriends of the girls who had snubbed me. I stole their boyfriends, one after another.” After a failed first marriage to Jewish American journalist Stanley Karnow, Sarraute married the physicist Christophe Tzara, son of the Romanian-French Jewish writer Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock). Among the few mournful passages in “Before You Forget Everything!” are those describing how Sarraute and her husband euthanized Tristan Tzara, who was dying from cancer, by giving him a fatal injection.

A chain-smoker since age 15 despite her own repeated bouts of cancer, Sarraute is now widowed from her third husband, the noted political pundit Jean-François Revel. Even so, she remains determinedly frivolous; asked who she would prefer as company on a desert island, Sarraute opts for Raphaël Mezrahi, a French Jewish humorist of Tunisian origin, famous for his surreal prank interviews.

Watch a 2008 public service announcement by Claude Sarraute for the freeing of Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician then being held captive by kidnappers:

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent Forward contributor.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO