Sarkozy’s Shadow

Yasmina Reza spent a year shadowing Nicolas Sarkozy during his bid for the French presidency. “He’s typically Jewish in his passions, the speed of his mind,” Reza says of her subject.

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

When Yasmina Reza says that she made a deal with Nicolas Sarkozy to be a mouse on his campaign trail, she’s using the French idiom for fly on the wall. But the celebrated French playwright, actress and novelist is neither mouse nor fly. With the grace and intelligence of a tiger lingering at his side, she notices everything about her subject.
With his permission, Reza spent a year with Sarkozy, as he was crisscrossing France and traveling around the world in his bid for the presidency of France. She wasn’t interested in politics and current affairs, but character, philosophy and daily life. Her portrait, “Dawn, Dusk or Night,” a best-seller in France, was just published in English, with a translation by the author and

Pierre Guglielmina (Knopf).
The book is a series of short vignettes, scenes and verbal sketches. Written with directness and candor, it has a theatrical feel, with spotlights, walk-ons, snatches of conversation and quick changes of scenery. Sarkozy, the main character, appears impatient, sometimes childlike, a man of great ambition who loves an audience and detests rules. He doesn’t pretend to care about the frail senior residents of an Alzheimer’s Center he visits; rather these people are a backdrop to others he’ll speak to on camera. The author is not surprised by what she learns about her subject.
Reza, whose many plays, including “Art,” have been award-winning successes translated into many languages, sat in on high-level meetings and strategy sessions, and had more access to Sarkozy than the journalists covering him. It was as though they were riding in the proverbial press bus and she was up front in the limousine.
“I was exactly where the reporters wanted to be,” she tells The Jewish Week. “I have the material of a reporter, but I did not use it. It was not my purpose. I wanted to see existential behavior, not political matters of the moment.”
We meet in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, where she is staying during her book tour. Dressed in jeans, she exudes the easy elegance of French women. She speaks in part through a translator. Her English is fine, but she seeks precision.
“Dawn, Dusk or Night” is dedicated to G, another politician, but she avoids questions about his identity. The title is drawn from a line in the book.
“It means that there is no midday in political life. It’s always dawn, when the sun is high, with hope for the future. Then it’s tomorrow, the day after. The present doesn’t exist — it’s only used to create things for the future. When they [politicians] are old, it’s dusk or night or nothing.”
“The huge political men are not people who can abandon themselves to time passing. They are in a hurry.”
In her own life, she has midday; she makes sure to see the light.
About Sarkozy’s part-Jewish roots and his Jewish connection, she explains that it’s very complicated, that his mother’s father was Jewish — although he converted to Catholicism — and Sarkozy was very close with him. She sees him as a very good friend to Israel.
“To my point of view, he’s typically Jewish in his passions, the speed of his mind. As soon as he understood something he moved on. He was quickly bored, something I notice often with Jewish people. I am the same.”
Reza, the daughter of a Hungarian mother and a father born in Moscow to Iranian parents, sees her own blend of humor and tragedy in her writing as very Jewish.
“I think that all of my writing is inspired by my family’s way of speaking,” she says.
As for her own Jewish identity, she feels “more Jewish than Sarkozy. My parents are both Jewish from both sides. We weren’t religious at all — my parents were very assimilated, although my father, after the death of his mother, became more observant, at the end of his life. I am the kind of Jewish woman for whom the religious does not exist.”
After a meeting in New York with leaders of Jewish organizations, she writes, “Bragging. What other adjective could I choose to describe him at the French consulate meeting representatives of the major Jewish organizations? Maybe he is right, Jews have no particular affinity with modesty.”
About Sarkozy’s recent idea of twinning French kids with children who lost their lives in the Holocaust, she says, “Happily, he had no such idea during the campaign. It’s a horrible idea. It’s just stupid. Memory shouldn’t be a sentimental thing.”
Reza, whose most recent play, “The God of Carnage,” will be staged in New York next year, is watching the American election season from afar, as a concerned world citizen, imagining well what’s going on behind the scenes.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization