Romain Gary

Romain Gary (born Roman Leibovich Kacew, 1914, Vilnius, Russian Empire [now Lithuania], to a Lithuanian Jewish family, and died 1980, Paris, France) [novelist, war hero, diplomat, film director, and the only writer ever to win France’s Prix Goncourt twice—first under his own name (1956, The Roots of Heaven), and again in 1975 under the pseudonym Émile Ajar, whose true identity he concealed until after his death, for La Vie Devant Soi, translated as Madame Rosa.

The upheavals of World War I forced Gary and his mother into central Russia before they returned to Vilnius and later Warsaw. In 1928 they emigrated to Nice, France, where Gary was educated, studied law in Aix-en-Provence and Paris, and became a naturalized French citizen in 1935. During World War II he served as a pilot with the Free French Air Force under Charles de Gaulle, earning some of France’s highest military decorations. After the war he entered the French diplomatic service, serving in Bulgaria, Switzerland, the United Nations, and as French Consul General in Los Angeles, 1956-60. While serving in Los Angeles he became closely connected with Hollywood, married the American actress Jean Seberg in 1962 (his second marriage), directed two feature films, and increasingly devoted himself to writing after leaving the diplomatic service in the early 1960s. He claimed that he adopted the pseudonym of Emile Ajar in his later years in order to prove that books were judged more on biases concerning their authors than on their merits. The huge success of La Vie Devant Soi (Madame Rosa) tended to vindicate him.

Gary, Romain, (The Dance of Genghis Cohn [hc, World Publishing Co., 1968, transl. by the author with Camilla Sykes] B0006BVZ5C [pb, Signet Book, 1969] B000H4I1RS [mass mkt pb, Signet, 1969] 978-0451039293 [Set in postwar West Germany, The Dance of Genghis Cohn is a darkly comic, surreal novel that blends detective fiction, fantasy, satire, and Holocaust remembrance. Its central figure is Moishe “Genghis” Cohn, a Jewish cabaret comedian who was executed by the SS during the Holocaust. Refusing to disappear after death, Cohn returns as a dybbuk—a spirit from Jewish folklore—and takes possession of the man who killed him, former SS officer Otto Schatz.

Years after the war, Schatz has become a respected West German police commissioner investigating a baffling murder case. As he attempts to solve the crime, he is constantly tormented by Cohn’s irrepressible presence. The ghost mocks him, comments sarcastically on his every action, forces him to relive his wartime crimes, and even compels him to perform absurd routines from Cohn’s former life as a comedian. The resulting struggle is by turns hilarious, grotesque, and deeply unsettling.

Although structured around a police investigation, the novel’s true mystery concerns guilt, memory, justice, and the moral aftermath of the Holocaust. Gary uses the detective-story framework to ask whether ordinary legal institutions can ever adequately confront crimes of genocide, and whether perpetrators can ever escape the voices of their victims. The dybbuk becomes the embodiment of historical memory, ensuring that the murdered Jew cannot simply be forgotten as postwar Germany seeks to return to normality.

Rich in Jewish humor, folklore, and philosophical reflection, The Dance of Genghis Cohn is widely regarded as one of Gary’s greatest novels and one of the most original literary treatments of the Holocaust. While not a conventional crime novel, it makes effective use of police-procedural elements to explore the enduring consequences of Nazi crimes and the impossibility of separating justice from memory. – ChatGPT]

Ajar, Emile/Romain Gary, (The Life Before Us/Madame Rosa [pb, New Directions, 1986, transl. from the French by Ralph Manheim] B00DIL1O30 [See related film] [a poignant, often humorous novel narrated by Momo (Mohammed), an orphaned Arab boy growing up in the impoverished Belleville district of Paris. Momo is raised by Madame Rosa, an elderly, retired Jewish prostitute and Holocaust survivor who makes a meager living caring for the children of other prostitutes. Although she is physically frail, emotionally scarred by Auschwitz, and increasingly ill, she forms a deep, unconventional bond with Momo. Their relationship transcends differences of age, religion, and ethnicity, becoming the emotional center of the novel.

As Madame Rosa’s health and memory deteriorate, Momo gradually assumes responsibility for caring for her. The novel explores themes of love, abandonment, aging, dignity, identity, racism, immigration, and the lingering trauma of the Holocaust. Madame Rosa’s Jewish identity is central to her character: she lives with the psychological scars of Nazi persecution and fears being taken to a hospital, which she associates with deportation.

The story culminates in Momo’s determination to honor Madame Rosa’s wishes to die in the hidden basement room where she feels safe, rather than in an institution. The ending is deeply moving, emphasizing compassion and loyalty among society’s marginalized people.

Madame Rosa has lived on society’s margins. Her prostitution is neither sensationalized nor treated as a moral failing. Instead, it reflects the limited options available to a poor immigrant Jewish woman after surviving catastrophe. Her profession never defines her character; what defines her is her extraordinary capacity for compassion and sacrifice. Thus the novel explores Jewishness in proximity to criminalized or stigmatized social worlds, rather than Jewish criminality itself. Gary deliberately juxtaposes social marginality with moral greatness. He rejects simplistic notions of virtue and respectability.

In conclusion, Gary is not a crime or espionage writer in the conventional sense. His most relevant work lies in The Dance of Genghis Cohn, where the investigation of crime becomes a vehicle for confronting the Holocaust. The Life Before Us is relevant because it places a profoundly Jewish character within a marginalized social milieu that includes prostitution and petty crime, but it is fundamentally a literary novel about human dignity rather than about crime. Romain Gary died in Paris in 1980 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In a note left behind, he emphasized that his death was unrelated to the recent suicide of Jean Seberg. - ChatGPT] See also the entry on the film adaptation of Madame Rosa in the companion Filmography.