French Forum

Ruben Schwarzberg, the protagonist of the Haitian writer Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s 2017 novel Avant que les ombres s’effacent, is a Holocaust survivor who makes a transatlantic escape. The novel is a work of historical fiction that retraces the remarkable journey of an Ashkenazi Jewish refugee. Ruben is born in Lódź, Poland, in 1913, but, six years later, his family flees across the border to Germany after the massacre in Pińsk, when the Polish Army executed members of the Jewish community. The Schwarzbergs settle in Berlin, where the family prospers, and Ruben attends medical school. Yet the rise of the Nazis leads to renewed violence, and Ruben and his uncle Joe are imprisoned in Buchenwald. Somewhat miraculously, they are released after a former medical school professor intervenes on Ruben’s behalf. Through a series of chance encounters, Ruben makes his way to Paris, where he meets the Haitian poet, Ida Faubert, who informs him that the Haitian government has issued a decree that grants naturalized citizenship to Jewish refugees. In the fall of 1939, Ruben finds safe haven in Port-au-Prince, where he finally takes root. Ruben had long kept this story to himself. Yet, near the end of his life, the 2010 earthquake strikes Haiti, and Ruben feels compelled to speak of his past as a way to make sense of the devastation that surrounds him.

Ruben’s journey is astounding, perhaps even to readers with knowledge of the Holocaust or Haitian and Caribbean history. Yet this is not the first time that Holocaust refugees have been depicted in Caribbean fiction or that a Caribbean writer has considered the legacy of the Holocaust along-side forced migrations in the Caribbean, from the slave trade all the way to the precarious journeys of Haitian “boat people” in the late twentieth century.¹ As Sarah Phillips Casteel shows in Calypso Jews, such inter-diasporic reflection abounds in both anglophone and francophone contexts. [End Page 163] In her thoroughly engaging study of the connections between Jewish and black histories in the Caribbean, Casteel brings together a diverse group of writers, including Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, É douard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, and Caryl Phillips.² Well aware of the political and critical risks of comparing the Holocaust to other historical events, even the Middle Passage, Casteel digs deep into Jewish history in the Caribbean by incorporating the expulsion of Sephardim from the Iberian peninsula in the 1490s. “Caribbean literary invocations of the Sephardic expulsion and the Holocaust merit consideration,” Casteel argues, “for what they can tell us not only about representations of Jewishness in postcolonial writing but also about the shifting preoccupations and vocabularies of Caribbean poetics” (2). One of the great merits of the book lies in Casteel’s handling of shifting historical and intercultural perspectives. However, apart from a brief analysis of Myriam Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels, Haitian literature and history is absent in Calypso Jews.

Historically speaking, Haiti was not the only Caribbean country that took in refugees during the Second World War. Nor was this the sole period during which the Haitian government granted asylum to refugees. In Freedom’s Mirror, the historian Ada Ferrer brings to light two moments of early nineteenth-century Haitian history, when Presidents Alexander Pétion and Jean-Pierre Boyer invoked the principle of “free soil,” or the constitutional right to freedom and citizenship to all “Africans and Indians” on Haitian lands.³ Yet this history remains largely forgotten or unknown. These complex historical, cultural, and geographical layers inform Dalembert’s literary imaginary. As such, the entwined histories of radical conceptions of race and freedom, and migration and asylum in Avant que les ombres s’effacent complicate ongoing debates in a number of fields, including Holocaust studies, Haitian studies, French and Francophone studies, and even those outside literature and history that take up the question of migrants and refugees, such as Anthropology and Political Philosophy. This essay focuses on the literary representation of the circuitous path of Ruben’s itinerary...