A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue
very early. It was always with the community—institutions and their representatives—that he, as a man of the Alliance nonetheless, entered into conflict, as was the case in Sofia and Izmir. In fact, Arié remained a free agent before anything else.
Although he had character, he was also hypersensitive, in part because of his illness. He experienced the death of his father, his daughter, and his wife as tragedies, but he succeeded in overcoming them. A man of action, he knew he had to continue living in spite of everything. He remarried quickly to avoid the loneliness that pursues men of his age, and him more than others, since at that stage most of his children and the members of his extended family were dispersed. In his advanced age, he continued to look on women as nurses, angels of the house, whom it was difficult to do without. Death was disorder; remarriage, a remedy.
His pessimism—or, rather, a fatalism of the Eastern type—and his superstitious side broke with the apparent rigidity that seems to have marked his character. For him, the love of order, the remedy for his anxiety, was continually shadowed by the disorder that was at the very foundation of his trajectory and his being. Instead of continuing on his family’s path, he changed course and led a different life; his carefully planned career as a teacher was interrupted by his illness, generating disorder. And yet illness was already part of the family history. He opted for a conventional marriage but found himself involved in love affairs that went against that conjugal order. He sought financial security in a post as a teacher, but at the end of the road found himself once more in business, an area known for the unforeseen, for risk. In the beginning, he sought treatment in a sanatorium, a regimented environment, a disciplinary universe,80 but he rapidly lost confidence in doctors and medication and definitively abandoned them. Gabriel Arié also chose the school, the regimented place par excellence, as his professional environment, but he abandoned it, not appreciating it overly much, since he chose not to send his children to school whenever he could manage it. He lived in that duality between order and disorder, and he provoked that disorder by revolt, by breaking with the established order at the very foundation of his social class of adoption.
Conservative in his ideas on education, politics (fear of Bolshevism), family, marriage, and many other points, by the life he led he also incarnated revolt. One of the most important revolts was illness. Through enclosures—institutions—in this case the Alliance, the school, the family, and the sanatorium, Gabriel Arié sought desperately the security he lacked. He went so far as to specialize in insurance, also setting up his children in a career that, as its name indicates, insures beings and goods. The sanatorium, with its rhythms and rituals, claims to be a reassuring universe, where the patient is taken in hand by the medical corps, but it is at the same time a place of anxiety.81 As soon as that security was guaranteed, he found it suffocating and attempted to break through these enclosures and go elsewhere, to breathe, as he did in the mountains associated with his treatment. He fled his family of origin to conquer new intellectual and social horizons, because it was suffocating him—like the coughing episodes that prevented him from breathing.
School, the sanatorium, illness, and even Judaism are major sites of rituals, which are reassuring because of their repetition. In his tuberculosis, there was also that duality of order and disorder, the first ensured by incessant observation of the development of his illness, typical of tuberculosis patients, the second by the break and, as a result, the upheaval at every level that it provoked his life. Although he created new barriers for himself, he liberated himself from others, but without knocking them down altogether, as in his relations with the Alliance, for example.
The link between Gabriel Arié and illness resembles that between himself and his family. It was a tie of attraction and repulsion. Influenced by the fashionable theories of heredity, or rather by the “mythologies of heredity” developed by doctors and novelists of the time,82 he did not dissociate illness from family: “The terror of ‘defects’ transmitted and of ‘damaged’ blood places the family into a link in a chain, a link whose fragility requires vigilance.”83 Illness sometimes emerged as a mode of expression within the family. Arié himself alluded to the fact that his mother resorted to it to get attention and that she stopped doing so when her son or daughter-in-law became ill. As a result, illness became commonplace and no longer had the same meaning. This extended family, living within the same house, was suffocating, and manifested its discomfort in illness. Illness was also a distinctive sign of the family, whose members were affected by the century’s malady, tuberculosis. Gabriel Arié’s own son Sandro suffered from it and had to stay in Berck, France, for a long time. The son was at the seaside while the father was in the mountains. Diabetes was the second illness that affected the direct family: both his daughter Ida and his wife Rachel died of it. Arié especially associated defective lungs, the organ of breathing, with the family. It was to have the air he was lacking that he sought out heights, mountains, the symbolic place of healing. “The ill are people of the plains, who rise above their places and environments of origin, having to overcome anxiety, sometimes physical in nature, as a general rule.”84 Gabriel Arié was destined to experience that anxiety inherent in his existence, which he tried to stifle in the enclosed worlds he chose for himself, but which in their turn suffocated him and from which he attempted to escape. He continually moved back and forth between these places and the outside, the symbol of deliverance. His illness, which in itself represents a break, linked Arié to the West, his universe of adoption, just as the family illnesses he bore within himself and the career he chose late in life linked him to his lineage and his cultural environment.
The practice of a career associated with the intellectual domain had only been a parenthesis. And yet his wish to exercise a career other than commerce, the traditional career path for Jews, particularly in the East, manifested a desire to leave his environment. In business, Gabriel Arié continued to write and to find a place for himself in the intellectual realm. Always regretting what he was leaving behind, he was one of those beings whose choices exile them from the universe for which they were destined, and who are condemned to live in the duality and tensions exile produces.
He attributed the causes of his illness not only to family heredity, which he experienced as fate, but also to external factors. These also stemmed from the environment he had wanted to reject: worries caused by the people of the Izmir community, who did not seem to appreciate him, and by the evil eye, a superstition anchored in the popular realm. Arié thus found himself once more prisoner to the same interpenetrating circles: family, community (the official family to which every Jew in traditional milieus belonged), and the cultural group in general, the Sephardim, the great ethnocultural family.
From the beginning of his illness in 1898, he undertook a tour of spas and mountain villages. He was seeking purification, which would come about through water and air. The conquest of a new physical universe also signified the conquest of the new identity he was seeking. Arié moved a great deal. He hid his anxiety in each change of location—escape, combined with hyperactivity. As a teacher, he changed countries and cities several times; he traveled a great deal within and outside the Balkans; then, with his illness, he once more took to the road in pursuit of recovery, in all senses of the word. Gabriel Arié’s itinerary allows us to reconstitute the path of tuberculosis, where Switzerland was the locale of choice. From one sanatorium to another, he tried to kill off his death anxiety, to regulate it, to enclose it in these enclosed places, in order to familiarize himself with it and thus get around it. Death at an early age was also hereditary in his family. Would he inherit nothing from that family but illness and death? They hung about him continually. They made their mark on his relations with the family.
Of course, Gabriel Arié was in the first stages of his illness, since sanatoria were open only to patients whom medicine considered curable. At one point, he thought about ending his life, but he continued to struggle to conquer obstacles, as he would throughout his life. During his stay in Switzerland, he looked within himself for the will to get well, putting an end to the regimentation of the sanatoria and the closed universe of illness and healing. There again, it was in activity that he found salvation. This was one way for him to reconnect with life and escape the exclusion that threatened anyone who transgressed. At no moment in his stay did he entirely set aside his profession or his family. He adapted to the new conditions and thus adapted his familiar universe to his new status. It is that adaptability that makes Gabriel Arié an interesting