“I came back to be European and, irony of ironies, Europe is showing me why my grandparents left. For a novelist and student of history, this is a fantastic experience. For the grandmother of French grandchildren, it is agony.”
These are the words of Nidra Poller, an American Jewish novelist and translator who has lived in Paris since 1972. They appeared in an essay called “Betrayed by Europe, an Ex-Patriate’s Lament” in the right-wing publication Commentary in 2003.
In the essay, Poller describes an atmosphere so dangerous for Jews that it is difficult to differentiate it from Nazi Germany.
Poller was recently in the Bay Area, speaking at Congregation B’nai Shalom in Walnut Creek on Tuesday, Nov. 30.
And in a telephone interview prior to her speech, she spoke of an atmosphere so toxic in France that, for the first time in 30-some years, she is seriously considering moving back to the United States.
Poller, a Pennsylvania native, went to live in Paris when her children were teenagers, because she always wanted to live abroad. Her children all married French citizens, and she now has eight grandchildren.
Poller said that she once believed in universalism, but the Gulf War in 1991 changed that, when anti-Semitism began rearing its head in her adopted land.
“I was absolutely astonished to see that anti-Semitism could come back in a very virulent way.”
The arrival of her grandchildren also had a way of bringing her back. “My grandchildren are not Jewish, and the only way they would experience Judaism was by what I would give to them,” she said. “So I started to make more efforts to celebrate the holidays.”
While the Gulf War served as somewhat of a wake-up call to Poller, the beginning of the second intifada — or more specifically, Ariel Sharon’s now infamous visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in September 2000 — changed everything.
Poller said the French have completely embraced the Arab agenda, and she believes that exposing it is only going to help change things.
She’s been spending more and more time in the United States, publishing in right-wing publications and speaking here.
“I hope I’m trying to do something so France will change its path. It’s not pleasant to see a country going into a suicidal mode,” she said. “It’s one of the worst countries in Europe for supporting the cause of the Arab world.”
Poller said that while there are elements of the Arab world that are progressive and in favor of democracy, there is a “retrograde” movement that France supports, which is “to live with violence and resentment, mulling over the old stories where you didn’t get what you wanted.”
The French relate to this, she said, because “France lives with dreams of lost glory.”
Poller calls the second intifada “the war against Israel,” and said that since 9/11, the French have turned almost as anti-American as they are anti-Israel.
Poller is not sure whether she is ready to return to the United States permanently, but she is sad in that she knows she will never consider France home in the same way again.