A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
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sometimes helps him get well and, in any case, can have medical value.”50 Arié’s journal, begun when he was extremely sick in Davos, was continued until the author’s death in 1939. Did he write it for himself? We know that the journal both is and is not addressed to the Other.51 It would be very risky to question the sincerity of this journal. Why must a journal be sincere, even when, fundamentally, its author aspires toward sincerity? In what way is sincerity an asset in this kind of writing? We might presume that everything can be said in a journal, but we know that, in fact, all kinds of prohibitions and taboos intervene and form obstacles.
Arié’s journal is permeated by the theme of illness, which, once the illness stabilizes, is transformed into the theme of professional success and money. Illness and money are often linked and interchangeable. Illness is a factor that takes away one’s security, while the lack of money does the same. Throughout the pages of this journal the fear of being without money and the satisfaction of possessing it recur; the benefits money procures are given less importance than the security it provides. We know that money problems generally have an important place in journals.52 Year after year, Arié tallies up the money amassed and looks with satisfaction on the distance traveled. From being a mere teacher, obliged to take odd jobs to make ends meet, then an invalid supported by his brother or living on the pension granted by the Alliance, he slowly made his way later on. Between 1885 and 1887, he tried his luck at business, resigning for the first time from the Alliance, his protective mother. He returned to the fold after his failure. It was only after he left Davos that he began to make a name for himself in insurance and banking. By the 1920s he was a rich man, free from want. Even though he never tallied up his fortune, he noted that he was wealthy. In any case, his many trips abroad and his photographs attest to his bourgeois way of life. His relative recovery also delivered him from his lack of self-confidence. For him, becoming an instructor in the Alliance schools had represented the beginning of financial security, as opposed to what he had known at his parents’ home, since his father’s economic situation had always been mediocre. For a long time, he lived haunted by the idea that what had happened to his father—a series of humiliations endured from his employers, his mother’s brothers—would be replicated in his own life. His first business failure confirmed him in his fears. The departure from Davos in 1913 was thus accompanied by a new social and economic departure. The parenthesis had lasted eight years.
Family also occupies a preponderant place, but it is not always spared, which is common in journals in general.53 Individualism is subordinated to family life, a trait of bourgeois civilization.54 The Other occupies an important place and situates the author in relation to those who surround him, even though the primary protagonist remains the omnipresent self. The author also dwells on misfortunes and good fortune, more on the first than on the second; there is nothing astonishing in this either. And although in the journal it is common to record everything relating to one’s love life,55 Gabriel Arié does so with a great deal of circumspection, thus conforming to local mores, which obliged him to say little and to resort to subterfuges when doing so. We nevertheless find, next to certain explicit confessions, others that are barely outlined but easily discernible.
“The journal allows for a certain leveling of events. A war or revolution often holds no more place than a headache or the purchase of a pair of shoes.”56 Arié does not completely escape that constant, even though he remains relatively sensitive to what is going on around him in society. In fact, it was as much to complete the public aspect of the individual, of this self with which one becomes familiar throughout the text, as to situate him in the social and political context of his age that we added a selection of letters written to the Alliance. We have thus been led to mark the text and establish the exchange between the private and the public man, even while respecting the text’s original continuity and linearity. Of course, the letters are administrative in nature, of a kind one finds by the thousand in the Alliance archives. The Alliance teachers had a style particular to them, which corresponded above all to the imperatives of the leadership, who were very keen on spelling and syntax. In addition, there was the ideological mold into which instructors poured everything, so as not to cross the leadership and thus bring trouble upon themselves. Gabriel Arié was no exception, but for most of his life he had the privilege of addressing the leadership as an equal. It is through this relationship that we discover certain of the traits of the man Arié, who adopted a way of expressing himself proper to himself even though he shared the ideas in force within the organization. Arié expected nothing from the Alliance except a certain respectability, which he no longer needed after Davos once his fortune had bestowed it upon him. It was within this space of freedom created by his independence that we begin, by seeking the public man, to find the private man, once the masks have been removed. The correspondence itself, read at a second level, links up with the autobiography and the journal, completes and enriches them; at certain times, the public and the private combine regardless of the lines separating them, as they do in life. The man in his completeness offers himself, flees, and reemerges beyond the conventions imposed by the institutional correspondence. Nonetheless, we would have liked to have his private correspondence, which would have allowed us to encounter him somewhere else, once more, and perhaps differently.
Properly speaking, Arié’s journal is not an examination of his conscience, as is often the case in this genre of writing; even less is it an act of contrition for sins committed.57 The confession aspect, with its secret side, does not truly appear. There again the character’s circumspection is manifest; we no longer know if he was writing his journal for himself or for others. The dialogue with himself does not leap out from the page. In a society turned toward the outside, could the individualist act par excellence—the writing of a journal—also be turned entirely toward the outside, in this case toward his immediate family? The author provides a balance sheet of the facts marking the year, with the event taking precedence over analysis, except on a few occasions. Accumulation, a prominent trait of Arié’s conduct, returns at different stages in both the autobiography and the journal. As a young man, he accumulated readings, livelihoods, women, businesses, moves, and, to a certain extent, children, if he is compared to other members of his immediate family, who belonged to that generation where adopting the Western bourgeois values led, for the wealthy strata, to a progressive drop in the birthrate. Was it by class reflex that he accumulated personal property and real estate the way the bourgeoisie stores up money, or was it first of all a manifestation of his insecurity?
The author judges others more than he judges himself, and there sometimes emanates from the text the satisfaction he feels in contemplating himself, especially when he succeeds at his new departure in life. Does he contemplate himself in relation to others or in relation to what he once was? In any case, the distance traveled is not negligible. Once again the exemplarity of the man leaps out, the example of a life worthy of being recounted, one that could serve as a model for his descendants. The author does what he must to be equal to his ambition. This trait links the journal to the autobiography, which also aimed for exemplarity. The circle is completed. Less than two years before his death he wrote: “In sum, I have reason to be satisfied with my health, which causes me worry but not torment, and with my excellent material situation, which causes me no concern, and with my children, who are following the path of honor and work. Can one ask for more out of life? No, and that is why I am ready to leave them when it pleases God, praising Providence for having all in all given me the good life in this world.” Arié passed on not only his business and his fortune to his children but also his example. The nineteenth-century bourgeois family was also, as we know, the vehicle of patrimony,58 ensuring continuity and reproduction.
Gabriel Arié created a history for himself in writing it down,59 his history and that of his family. That history is also a true memoir of the incipient Sephardi and Levantine bourgeoisie of the time, in the Balkans in evolution, though it is a bourgeoisie seen through the eyes of Gabriel Arié, restored as a function of what he wanted to transmit, or was able to transmit, to us. That history has been conserved almost intact despite the vulnerability of this type of writing, which is very often reworked by members of the family, sometimes obfuscated through the allusions of the author—or simply destroyed.60 Other than a few insignificant cuts made by the family, Gabriel Arié’s autobiography and journal have been faithfully handed down to us.
Autobiography