Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Claude Sarraute: A Disobedient Daughter

The French Jewish journalist Claude Sarraute, 82, is the daughter of the noted Russian Jewish novelist Nathalie Sarraute (born Natalia Tcherniak). A new memoir from Éditions Plon, “Before You Forget Everything!” explains how Sarraute consciously avoided following in her mother’s footsteps.

The elder Sarraute was the author of abstract, sober philosophical narratives such as “Do You Hear Them?”; “The Planetarium”; and “Martereau,” which many French literati admit to finding incomprehensible. By contrast, Claude Sarraute has made a career out of writing humorous articles for French newspapers, and droll books like “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît” (Please, Miss!), about department store salesladies, which she researched by actually working for three months at Paris’s Galeries Lafayette.

As Ann Jefferson persuasively argues in “Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference,” the elder Sarraute’s consciousness of being different as a Russian Jew in France influenced her work. Although defiantly populist (and popular), her daughter Claude also retains an element of otherness. Claude always wears a Star of David in memory of wartime persecutions — as a bubbly adolescent, she was suddenly snubbed by her classmates after the German invasion. After the war, she took her vengeance, she notes, by “openly flirting with all the boyfriends of the girls who had snubbed me. I stole their boyfriends, one after another.” After a failed first marriage to Jewish American journalist Stanley Karnow, Sarraute married the physicist Christophe Tzara, son of the Romanian-French Jewish writer Tristan Tzara (born Samuel Rosenstock). Among the few mournful passages in “Before You Forget Everything!” are those describing how Sarraute and her husband euthanized Tristan Tzara, who was dying from cancer, by giving him a fatal injection.

A chain-smoker since age 15 despite her own repeated bouts of cancer, Sarraute is now widowed from her third husband, the noted political pundit Jean-François Revel. Even so, she remains determinedly frivolous; asked who she would prefer as company on a desert island, Sarraute opts for Raphaël Mezrahi, a French Jewish humorist of Tunisian origin, famous for his surreal prank interviews.

Watch a 2008 public service announcement by Claude Sarraute for the freeing of Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian politician then being held captive by kidnappers:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.