Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Nancy, André Spire (1868–1966) came of age at a time when, as Daniel Solomon puts it, France’s Jews felt “a serene confidence” in their place in French society. Spire, an aspiring poet and writer pursuing a career in the civil service, challenged anti-Semites to duels on more than one occasion. But soon he concluded that anti-Semitism was too big a problem to be solved with pistols:
Spire declared himself a Zionist for the first time in a letter to his mother, dated October 12, 1904. . . . “I do not feel much enthusiasm to live with [Polish Jews], but it would be much better to live with them than with many Christians. . . . So, ‘next year in Jerusalem.’”
The appearance of Poèmes Juifs (1908) announced Spire’s debut as an unbending opponent of assimilation and indefatigable proponent of Zionism. . . . Spire’s poems savaged the Franco-Jewish consensus and the figure of the assimilated Jew. In “Assimilation,” he mocks a Jewish bourgeois who seeks to blend into the crowd. The poem’s unnamed protagonist scrutinizes himself for the slightest deviation from the norm—in deportment, speech, hand gestures, nose shape, hair texture—and reassures himself that he can fit in. The poet breaks in the last stanzas to upbraid this French Jewish bourgeois.
More about: French Jewry, Poetry, Zionism