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Man of the century
By Gaby Levin
Tags: Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann 

A literary happening of the first order is what the French press is calling Claude Lanzmann's autobiography, "Le Lievre de Patagonie" ("The Patagonian Hare"), published two months ago by Gallimard. The French film director, journalist and intellectual packs more than 70 years of contemporary history into 550 pages. The book moves at a dizzying pace, with precise, rich prose of rare beauty. It's a breathless read.

Lanzmann directed the monumental documentary "Shoah" (1985), as well as "Israel, Why" (1972) and "Tsahal" ("IDF," 1994). He is one of the most sober and engaged witnesses of the 20th century, a fighter, adventurer and artist who has now written an excellent book.

An energetic 84-year-old, Lanzmann does not pay much heed to the passage of time. In a telephone interview from Paris, just before he left for a two-month vacation in the south of France, and following the media brouhaha surrounding the publication of his book, he said about the writing process: "Time? Chronology? After all, it's a matter of before and after, and irrelevant. I put the 12 years I worked on 'Shoah' inside brackets. Only when I looked back did I notice that the years had passed."
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He wrote the autobiography the same way he created "Shoah" - without a plan, and not in chronological order. "Things assumed their place in a natural way. To start I wrote the first page by myself, put it aside and waited two years," he says. "Then I began to dictate to my assistant, sitting beside her, watching the sentences arrange themselves on the computer screen."

His thoughts moved faster than he could write, and so, he says, there are parts in the book he had not intended to tell, like the story of his mother and the life and suicide at 36 of his younger sister, the actress Evelyne Rey, a lover of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

Crazy Simone de Beauvoir

Though Lanzmann's book is a love song to life, it begins, paradoxically, with a hair-raising chapter on the guillotine and other methods of execution. Lanzmann, a militant opponent of capital punishment, has more than once been in danger of losing his life. But he does not look death in the eye, he simply ignores it.

Lanzmann was born in 1925 in Paris, to a Jewish family with Eastern European roots (though his father was also born in France, and his grandfather fought for the French in World War I). Young Claude lived with his father and siblings (Jacques, who became a well-known writer and librettist) and his younger sister Evelyne. In 1943, during the Nazi occupation, Claude organized an underground group of Communists at his school in Clermont-Ferrand. Until the end of the war, he and his father belonged to the Resistance, smuggling arms and taking part in attacks on the German army in the Auvergne region.

After the war he moved to Paris to live with his mother Paulette and her new husband. Paulette, an unusually colorful character, left her first husband and small children in 1934, feeling smothered inside her bourgeois family. She worked as a simple laborer in a canning factory until she met the love of her life, a Serbian refugee who belonged to a circle of surrealist poets.

Lanzmann, whose relations with his mother remained highly charged in his teens, appreciates her courage to break with convention. In the book, he creates a stunning portrait of a woman with a winning personality, despite a bad stutter and large nose, which made him ashamed of her.

After the liberation of France, Lanzmann studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and earned a living in dubious ways that might have been taken from a Luis Bunuel film. For example, he dressed as a priest and tried to obtain donations for a church from residents of Paris' bourgeois 16th arrondissement. He also stole philosophy books from stores near the university and resold them.

After stays in Berlin and Tubingen, Germany, where he studied and taught philosophy, he returned to Paris and met Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir. The meeting changed his life. "They helped me to think, and I caused them to think," he writes.

He became the editor of the political-literary journal "Les Temps Modernes" ("Modern Times"), which he manages to this day, joining the postwar circles of important writers and thinkers. Beauvoir, then 44, was wooed by the 27-year-old Lanzmann and began a passionate seven-year affair with him. "The presence of Lanzmann at my side liberated me from age," she wrote in her memoirs.

Many biographies have been penned about the feminist writer and philosopher, who was not only a life partner to Sartre and his philosophy, but also the fervent lover of American writer Nelson Algren. Despite everything written about her, it seems Beauvoir has never been portrayed so authentically and full of contradictions as in Lanzmann's book.

"She was crazier than I am," Lanzmann writes, describing trips with her to the mountains and desert, where she took irresponsible and unnecessary risks, though she appeared on the surface to be conscientious and orderly. He describes with warmth her anxieties and passions, her ability to concentrate, and her desire to learn everything about everything and everyone.

The magic of Jewish power

Lanzmann first visited Israel in 1952, and his encounter with the young Jewish state struck a serious, spiritual chord: a state where everyone was Jewish (in his eyes). The police and prostitutes he encountered as soon as he left the ship in Haifa seemed to him a mix of normality and abnormality (which he later tried to explain in his film "Israel, Why").

Israel raised questions about Lanzmann's Jewish identity: For the first time he felt like an accidental Frenchman and not a deeply rooted one. Questions about the connection between the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel, and Israel's relations with Arab countries, began to occupy him. On his return to France, he shared his thoughts with Sartre, author of "Anti-Semite and Jew," convincing him that a Jew is not defined merely by anti-Semitism. A Jew, according to Lanzmann, has tradition and heritage behind him, and a long history.

The magic the Israel Defense Forces worked on him - which Lanzmann calls "Jewish power" - is presented in an almost sensual way throughout the book. In an unforgettable chapter, he describes the experience of flying an F-16 Phantom jet with a young pilot, Eitan Ben Eliyahu (who later became the commander of the Israel Air Force), while filming "Tsahal."

When asked about his current attitude toward Israel, Lanzmann answers at first with a memory. "I met Ben-Gurion, who said to me: 'Nu, come [to Israel] already, we need people like you.' I was a friend of Arik Sharon, I loved him and had great hopes for his meetings with Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], but today I am pessimistic about the chances for peace," he says.

"When Israel reached the age of 60, I brought out a special issue of 'Modern Times,' under the heading 'Israel young at 60.' But to my sorrow the division between Israel and the Palestinians is too deep, as are the differences of opinion among Israelis. I'm a great friend of Israel, I'm sensitive to what's happening, but I'm pessimistic." Used a hidden camera

Used a hidden camera

He's upset that translation rights to his autobiography have not been acquired by an Israeli publisher. "Israel has such an important place in the book. It's a pity!" he says.

Most people identify Lanzmann with the film "Shoah," but he'd like to shake off this image to a certain extent. "I've made other movies, do you know that?" he asks.

Yet he dedicates about a third of his book to stories about the research and filming of "Shoah," beginning with the efforts of members of Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot to keep one member out of sight because of his tendency to drink, to a description of the way he interviewed former Nazis with a hidden camera and using an alias. This put his life in danger several times.

Lanzmann knew from the start he would not base the film on archive footage. And he did not intend to make a film about survivors, but to reach out toward death itself. He described the Holocaust without showing one documentary frame, creating a unique, impressive work of art.

"People identify easily with photos or fiction films in order to approach pain but also to escape from it. Because to describe 3,000 men, women and children turned into one mass, put to death with gas in a dark room - it is impossible to identify with this," Lanzmann says.

About his life now, he says: "I'm not indifferent to what goes on in the world, or tired of it. To live to 100 twice wouldn't be enough for me. I always knew that my creativity would be more meaningful in the second half of my life. Plans form slowly with me. I started to make films only after I was 40."

The new book is Lanzmann's first. Why did he call it "The Patagonian Hare"? For Lanzmann, hungry for life, the hare signifies the ultimate survivor, capable of sneaking under the barbed wire fences of Auschwitz-Birkenau (a scene that appears in "Shoah").

On a trip to Patagonia in the south of South America, in order "to hear the voices of the icebergs close up," Lanzmann saw a giant hare jump in front of his car and disappear into the bushes. "That Patagonian hare filled me with joy in its courage to leap powerfully in front of the wheels," Lanzmann says. "That's an animal I totally identify with."

Now, on the eve of a vacation, he admits he is a bit tired. "But I have 1,001 plans that demand consideration," he says. "And I promise you I won't be sitting with my hands folded during the holiday."
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