During his childhood, the French social historian Ivan Jablonka rarely saw his father cook. It was a traditional and sometimes unhappy family set-up. His father worked as a nuclear physics engineer and his mother taught literature at a secondary school. While his father would occasionally change Ivan’s nappies, as a husband he wouldn’t share in the household chores. When he was upset, he sometimes turned violent and beat his son.
Speaking to me from his home study in Paris, Jablonka told me his father was orphaned by the Holocaust. “His parents – my grandparents – were murdered during the Second World War, and as an orphan he embodied this figure of masculine vulnerability.” This complicated Jablonka’s childhood because he was both under the influence of a traditional male role model and aware of his father’s shortcomings. “I could feel that as an orphan my father was weak – he was fragile; he was weak.”
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