” We will live. Investigation into the future of the Jews”, by Joann Sfar, Les Arènes, “BD”, 456 p., €35.
The day we meet him at his publisher’s, Joann Sfar wears around his neck the “hai” (“life”, in Hebrew) offered by his friends for his 52nd birthday. On October 7, 2023, he had just calligraphed, for the jeweler, the two Hebrew letters composing this word symbol of Judaism. Upon learning of the Hamas attacks, he posted them on his social networks with one of the possible translations: ” We will live “. Six months later, We will live is the title of the thick album born from his dismay, his sorrow, his taste for explaining and his thirst to understand.
A book which initially seems to borrow its form from the drawn notebooks in which Joann Sfar chronicles her daily life and her reflections (the last published is The children didn’t give up, Gallimard, 2023). This mainly concerns the first half of We will live, where Joann Sfar is in France. After the massacres, the scale and horror of which are revealed a little more each day, he exchanges with living people as overwhelmed as he, but above all dialogues with the ghosts of his father and his grandfather.
Gradually, the work asserts its form of investigation, nourished, in its second part, by reports in Israel, in Tel Aviv, in the south of the country, and in Jerusalem, where the author interviews men and women, Jews, but not only, on the way they understand the present and the future after October 7, the war against Hamas and the deaths in Gaza – “I’m sick of it. My pen will never justify any killing”he writes.
The text, with the author’s comments or his meditations on the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, lends a hand to the drawing to show the complexity of reality, the weight of the past and the density of the anguish where bathe the beings whose portrait he draws – which does not exclude funny passages, with fierce, desperate or absurd humor.
Do you believe that “We will live” was born from October 7 itself or from the reactions that the massacre perpetrated by Hamas provoked in France and around the world?
October 7 is a tragedy which brought to light a kind of conceptual chasm concerning the Middle East, where the worst horrors are developing, including in Europe. Faced with this explosion and the fake news that followed, the uproar that was unleashed, the only possible reaction was for me to do my work as a designer with my vocabulary as a portraitist, giving a voice to as many people as possible. It’s about having a marker for the history of what Jews are today, from my perspective as a French, European Jew. After October 7, I couldn’t do anything else, I abandoned all my other projects. I felt like I could complete this investigation if I focused on it.
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