Jean-Yves Potel: Les Disparitions d’Anna Langfus (2014)

When people told her that the Prix Goncourt 1962 for Les bagages de sable (trans. The Lost Shore) would change her, the Polish Jew Anna Langfus’s reply – after suffering years of Nazi rule, years of torment, living in constant fear and watching many people casually slaughtered, having her husband and her parents murdered, her nanny dead – was simple: the Gestapo hadn’t changed her, so how could a few fleeting weeks of fame succeed?

This wasn’t in fact true about the Nazis not affecting her, as this extremely well-researched biography of Anna Langfus makes quite clear. It takes us through Anna’s relatively comfortable childhood in Lublin, Poland, through her education in Verviers, Belgium, and then spends some considerable time describing the torment that Polish Jews had to undergo during Nazi rule, the torture, the nonchalant mass murders, the creation of increasingly small ghettoes, the scarcity of food, the diseases: in a word, the hell of being a Jew in Poland under fascist rule.

And then after the war Anna couldn’t live in the cemetery that she saw as Poland, so left for France, to adopt French as her new tongue with her new husband Aron, also a Jewish Polish survivor. We don’t learn much about Aron, although we do of Anna and her struggle to master a new language, and learn to write creatively, aided by such friends as Maurice Finkelson, another Polish survivor, but one whose novels are now almost forgotten.

Anna Langfus didn’t have a great deal of success with her plays, although three novels – Le sel et le Souffre (1960), Les Bagages de sable (1962) and Saute, Barbara (1965) were all critically and popularly successful. Needless to say, all were about the Holocaust, surviving it physically, and attempting to survive it mentally, to live with the guilt of survival and the memory of the unspeakable atrocities.

Anna Langfus died of a heart condition in 1966 at the age of 46, leaving a husband and a daughter. She also left a small body of work which should be remembered for its importance, for the power it has to tell with such numbing detail exactly what happens when madness and madmen are allowed to take control of countries.

My Anna Langfus posts:
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Jean-Yves Potel: Les Disparitions d’Anna Langfus
Anna Langfus: Les Bagages de sable | The Lost Shore
Anna Langfus: Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, Hauts-de-Seine

Anna Langfus: Les Bagages de sable | The Lost Shore (1962)

Anna Langfus's Les Bagages de sable (trans. as The Lost Shore) won the Prix Goncourt in 1962, which made her only the fourth female winner since the first Goncourt in 1903. A female writer – Elsa Triolet – became the first female Goncourt winner in 1944: yes, all the winners from 1903 to 1943 were men. There have been 116 Prix Goncourt since its creation – but only 12 of them have been women. Furthermore, of the ten members of the Goncourt jury, only three are women, and the (at present male) jury leader is allowed to have two votes in case of a five-five final choice. Women, the perception seems to be, just can't write as well as men.

Anna Langfus's Les Bagages de sable is a tale of the post-traumatic stress disorder – with obvious autobiographical elements – of the young Polish woman Maria, whose family was killed during the war. (Anna Langfus is of Polish origin and writes French as a second language, her family was killed during World War II, she was tortured but was freed at the end of the war.)

The book is written as a kind of dreamscape, with Maria imagining or perhaps hallucinating her family, incapable of telling her story to those who haven't lived through what she has lived, only on one occasion speaking of a small part of her ordeal to a Polish survivor. In Paris at the beginning, passing people she meets on park benches have no idea of her internal suffering, which of course remains internal.

Eventually she meets an old man (Michel Caron) with a dog and grows to like him because he seems genuine and he doesn't ask questions. Unknown to her at the time, the old man, who has fallen in love with her, is married, and, leaving his wife, he takes Maria to the south of France where a friend has left him his basic home for an apparently indefinite time. Maria 'earn's' her keep by doing most of the housekeeping and sleeping with the man.

Maria knows that she is mature far beyond her years, and tries to break free from the stranglehold that her terrifying past has on her, but although she has many ways of finding defence mechanisms to stave off pain, she keeps falling back into the abyss.

This is an immensely powerful novel which deserves to be far better known than it is. My secondhand copy, apart from the first few pages, was uncut since 1962: it almost seems a crime to have it and not to read this devastating novel.  Also, clumsily, the back cover mis-spells the old man's name as 'Carron'.

My Anna Langfus posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Yves Potel: Les Disparitions d’Anna Langfus
Anna Langfus: Les Bagages de sable | The Lost Shore
Anna Langfus: Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, Hauts-de-Seine

Paris 2017: Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, Hauts-de-Seine (92) #2: Anna Langfus

Anna Langfus (1920 – 1966) won the prix Goncourt in 1962 (for Les Bagages de sable), and this is one of the few Goncourt graves I've come across to mention the Goncourt. But it certainly should be mentioned, if only because (at the time that I write) there have been only twelve female winners of the title since its creation in 1901. Langfus was a Polish Jew, and Les Bagages de sable concerns the difficulties of a Shoah survivor adapting to everyday circumstances.

My Anna Langfus posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Jean-Yves Potel: Les Disparitions d’Anna Langfus
Anna Langfus: Les Bagages de sable | The Lost Shore
Anna Langfus: Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, Hauts-de-Seine