MPR’s Minday Ratner interviews Alice Kaplan on her culture, growing up in Minnesota in a Jewish family and her book French Lessons: A Memoir. This interview also includes Kaplan reading from her memoir which is set in set in Saint Louis Park, Minnesota.

(00:00:00) I think that for my generation and for women and for middle-class women in particular French had a real Prestige. I don't know if you remember those images of Jacqueline Kennedy that we were bombarded with as children and oh sure images of Jacqueline Kennedy and to goal and the idea of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy who spoke French the incredible glamour of France and of course in a school in the school that I went to Northrop School French was the language along with lat Didn't I think probably now Spanish is more important. But in the 1960s French was the second language in girls
(00:00:37) schools. Here. We are in the Upper Midwest in a part of the world. That seems very kind of homogenized at least in terms of the culture that exists here. Not at all what one might describe as a microcosm of the universe and on some level. I think there's a certain sort of concentration of ideas that develops here about what it means to be of a certain ethnic background and so, you know, it's like being you know being Norwegian but more so or Swedish only more so or something, you know, whatever your your your family of Origins identity is around kind of becomes concentrated as the generations go on and yet you and I both come from from a background that we tend to become assimilated fairly quickly. You know, I read the beginning part of your book. You describe the area in which you live you were Jewish but not living in the Jewish Community you were someplace else on some level being somebody else.
(00:01:48) Yeah should read that. Oh, please please do. I grew up half a block from a city like in an old Minneapolis neighborhood populated by prosperous Republicans with names like Colby and Dorsey and white my parents hadn't migrated with others of their generation to the middle class Jewish suburb, St. Louis Park because my father wanted to be near a lake our house had been built in 1914 for people with servants. There were front stairs and back stairs a bell button buried in the dining room floor and on the wall of the Room an English hunting scene. There was an 8 burner restaurant stove with a griddle for pancakes and a Butler's Pantry with a cupboards painted cream outside and Mandarin red inside. There were five bedrooms and a library for my father and a close shoot and a separate garage with a big lilac tree and a rock garden for my mother. She had a garden Smock and gloves and would climb around out there while my father was at work in the spring the Lilac bloomed and the L came into our house the smell of our prosperity the previous owners had left a set of papers on the radiator in the dining room, which my parents found the day they moved in. It was a detectives report assuring the old owners. That although we were Jews are General comportment was in line with a gentility of the neighborhood was the seller stupid enough to leave the report by mistake or did he want us to see it and to understand our social responsibilities. Did it prove that we belong? There and that we were the exception this episode sat in the back of my mind as I grew up. I watched us we were on trial being upright for the neighborhood.
(00:03:36) Hmm on some level you kind of took that carry that through your life as you went to Switzerland learned a new language started to feel like you were somebody else.
(00:03:46) I think in fact that that early memory is is significant because I must have learned very young a desire to want to fit in a place where I didn't feel quite natural. So it's really wasn't that different in some ways Growing Up near Lake Harriet and Feeling oddly Jewish but no, no not really feeling marked Jewish mean that's what's so strange about Jewish identity and then being in Switzerland and wanting to sound Swiss or being in France and wanting to sound French so it I discovered in writing this book that my American Self and my French self were very consistent not different as I thought or dreamed or wanted or whatever. There's another scene in the early part of the book where I go into would Cemetery with a boy to make out right before I'm leaving for Switzerland on that was written in the first thing was kind of a racy passage to racy for faster. But when I went back to the cemetery to write that scene I had to find the grave and I couldn't find the exact grave. I remember there was a grave that had my name Alice and so I went back to the cemetery and I made a list of all the names trying to figure out which one I wanted to use. The book and I eventually I ended up using a Swedish name and I thought of that I think it's Bergstrom and that I used but I thought of that as my my false Minnesota self as opposed to my false French self that I discovered later on.
(00:05:22) So as you find or have found that that the different parts of you are not so different after all the French part and the American Jewish part still there something that happened. Some kind of transformation. Obviously, they took place that went along with learning the language. That's right.
(00:05:42) Yeah, I describing in fifth grade and how terrified we were in our class about our changing bodies and that for us making that sound are you know as in Khanna was very scary. It was sexual. It was about squinching up your mouth in a whole new way or making the sound very It was about a transformation in a Trent in it was a symbol of the transformation of puberty and our French teacher with her hairy legs sticking out of her nylon stockings was for us the Exotic the form but also the
(00:06:19) womanly so and you write about
(00:06:22) that later on I write learning French and learning to think learning to desire is all mixed up in my head until I can't tell the difference French is what released me from the cool complacency of the are. Resistors made me want and like wanting unbutton me and sent me packing French demands. My obedience gives me permission to try too hard to squinch up my face to make the word sound right French houses words, like existentialism that connote abstract thinking difficulties to which I can get the
(00:06:57) key and body parts, which I can claim
(00:07:00) French got me away from my family and taught me how to talk made me an adult. The whole drama of it is in that are how deep in my throat how different it
(00:07:11) feels. Would you be good enough if you wish to touch a little bit on the stuff that comes later about about demo and about the anti-Semitism of saline and and the way in which you you know, kind of reconcile yourself to, you know, your love of the literature with this awful. Way of being
(00:07:38) the minute I got to France. I understood that World War II was still very a raw wound. And that was fascinating to me and I also think that I had a need because I had gotten so much from France and in some ways had the country on a pedestal to take the country off the pedestal and find out what's really going on the same way. In other parts of the book. I want to find out what's really going on in my own family and take certain characters or certain people who are close to me off a pedestal and try to see them for whom they are one of the you know, I think the biggest problem in France right now the problem of memory of World War II in the memory of the occupation and how those people are going to come to terms with massive collaboration and the deportation of 75,000 French Jews to concentration camps of whom very Fury Stone percentage and that to me as an historian of French culture is the biggest issue and it's tied right now to anti-arab racism in the rise. As of the national front party and Lupin and all kinds of thing. It is an issue that doesn't go away.