Post-Holocaust Representations of Displacement: The Gender of Refugees in L'Arche, 1957–63

At the end of 1962, after the end of the Algerian War of Independence, the little-known Polish-Jewish novelist, Anna Langfus, was awarded the Goncourt prize for her novel Les Bagages de Sable. The novel told the story of a young woman who had survived World War Two and its horrors only to live as a displaced orphan in postwar France. The novel and its author may have been an anomaly to the French public. Her story of survival and displacement was less so to those French Jews who were assiduous readers of the monthly magazine L’Arche, which had been created in 1957 under the aegis of the Fonds Social Juif Unifié. Strikingly, the magazine prominently featured articles about exiled authors writing about the Holocaust, of which Anna Langfus was one, alongside Elie Wiesel and Piotr Rawicz. Langfus, however, was both an author championed in the pages of L’Arche and one of its contributors. At the same time, L’Arche started reporting extensively on the question of “our refugees,” namely Jews living in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, and calling for greater understanding especially of the plight of Algerian Jews who, the magazine chronicled, were being “forced to leave colonial Algeria” for metropolitan France. L’Arche focused especially on the plight of North African Jewish women. This paper examines how a particular (gendered) representation of refugees emerged in those years and how that figure blended the emerging “memory” of the Holocaust experience with that of decolonization in order to forge a particular French Jewish identity. It allows us to see how the figure of the “refugee” was shaped by competing political contexts that illuminated as much as they obscured the manner in which global and colonial wars and their aftereffects called into question the way community and citizenship were reimagined in Cold War France.