ABSTRACT
In January 1988, when I arrived at the platform of the Paris train station La Gare du Nord, I saw a small crowd of people waving their hands. They were my French friends, all of them Russian language and literature professionals, teachers, scholars, and translators who had spent many years working in Russia and who had brought real France to my apartment at Lenin Avenue. When I was getting off the train, they were all crying: My visit to France was a symbol of the opening up of Russia, of the up-lifted iron curtain, of the historic change of the world that had started with Gorbachev's perestroika, after decades of dictators' prison. Before that time, ordinary people, especially Jews, were not allowed by the Soviet government to travel abroad: Soviet citizens were all doomed to the Soviet happiness because they did not know how unhappy they really were. I always knew, however—through my friends from France, England, America, and through books—and I was unhappy. For many years I was teaching, learning, reading, translating, and writing in French—yet I could never travel to the country of my dreams to work, study, develop professionally, or see people who were dear to me. I knew from a very early age that I was being denied a number of human rights, and this knowledge grew from hatred and bitterness into a surrogate of intrinsic freedom—an aphrodisiac identity of the foreign culture and language—my France. Nobody could ever take this right from me, deprive me of this artificial world—my France—expropriate its richness and glory, repeatedly humiliate me as a person and as a professional. I constructed the walls of my fortress, and my beloved France was inside, the untouchable jewel of my creation. And because I was the center of that universe, I had to learn to do everything a French person does: speak with a Parisian accent, joke about domestic politics, sing children's songs, read and enjoy grotesque detective stories in argot as well as the most sophisticated literature, write in French in any style, curse, gesticulate, give speeches, count mentally, and dip the imagined croissant into coffee. I had to know how the French make their beds, talk on the phone, write business letters, and cook meals from different provinces. By instinct of survival, without even being aware of it, but just loving it, I made living and functioning in French my primary goal. But I never left the Soviet Union and that is the reason my friends cried when they finally saw me in Paris. The story of my fluency in French is the story of building a language identity. It was generated by my love of French culture, traditional historical ties between the two countries, but most of all by my personal way of dealing with the political regime and the sociocultural bias it created. Becoming an émigré de l'intérieur as the only spiritual and moral salvation made a foreign language belong to me: It was my Dasein, my being-in-the-world. The tragic situation of the Jewish intelligentsia in the Soviet Union, many of whom were deprived of professional careers and formal education, stimulated their learning beyond the official norms and frames, creating various unique ways for the reconstruction of self-esteem. Some became political dissidents and took enormous risks; some went insane; some turned to their religion or converted to another one. I became French.
