This book review was published in the Observer
22 March 2009
A Frenchwoman and feminist nonpareil
A Life: The Autobiography of Simone Veil
by Simone Veil, Haus Publishing, £16.99
The life story is a debased genre, but occasionally someone writes one who actually has something to say. Simone Veil is one of those. She survived Auschwitz and later, as minister of health, allowed French women the right to control their bodies by steering abortion law through Catholic France. She lifted European politics to a new level as first president of the European parliament, where her intellect, grace and calm Europeanism turned the Strasbourg assembly into a serious body.
Yet this memoir is more than a straight record of achievement. It is a vade mecum to French life as lived and experienced from the 1930s to the present day and a profound insight into the feminine condition.
At each stage of her life, Simone Veil had to overcome male resistance in one form or another: a loving, intellectual husband who saw the role of a wife and a mother as being at home; a judicial system that could not handle a woman determined to be a judge and expose wrongs in France's ancient regime prison system; and then the male politicians who want women as tokens in ministerial office but still see government as men's business.
Veil was born to an atheist Jewish family in the 1930s. Sent to Auschwitz as a teenager, she lost her parents and other family members in the gas ovens. Veil dismisses Hollywood films like Schindler's List and remains bitter that it took the French state until 1995 to acknowledge that it was the official French government, not some renegade clique of Petainists, that organised the deportation of Jews from France as late as 1944. Yet at the same time, she tells story after story of non-Jewish French citizens helping to hide and protect Jews.
She is critical of General de Gaulle, who covered up French complicity in the Holocaust and openly despised Israel and the Jewish people when he returned to power. By contrast, she has kind words for Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who made her minister of health in 1974 explicitly to make abortion legal and promote women's rights.
Veil is not a campaigner for Jewish causes, but being Jewish is central to her life. She criticises those who apply the term genocide or Holocaust to ugly, brutal violence and killings in the Balkans conflicts or Gaza; she witnessed the Holocaust and knows the difference.
She is a campaigner for Europe, as an ideal and a cause. The British equivalent might be a cross between Shirley Williams and George Weidenfeld. Veil's French is that of the classically trained French intellectual who pares words to fit thoughts as tautly as possible. Something is inevitably lost in translation, but the small publishing firm Haus is to be congratulated on making available in English this account of a great Frenchwoman's life.
If it comes out in paperback, the English for garde des sceaux is not keeper of the seals but minister of justice. But then how does the foreigner translate lord privy seal or chancellor of the exchequer?
A Life: The Autobiography of Simone Veil
by Simone Veil, Haus Publishing, £16.99
The life story is a debased genre, but occasionally someone writes one who actually has something to say. Simone Veil is one of those. She survived Auschwitz and later, as minister of health, allowed French women the right to control their bodies by steering abortion law through Catholic France. She lifted European politics to a new level as first president of the European parliament, where her intellect, grace and calm Europeanism turned the Strasbourg assembly into a serious body.
Yet this memoir is more than a straight record of achievement. It is a vade mecum to French life as lived and experienced from the 1930s to the present day and a profound insight into the feminine condition.
At each stage of her life, Simone Veil had to overcome male resistance in one form or another: a loving, intellectual husband who saw the role of a wife and a mother as being at home; a judicial system that could not handle a woman determined to be a judge and expose wrongs in France's ancient regime prison system; and then the male politicians who want women as tokens in ministerial office but still see government as men's business.
Veil was born to an atheist Jewish family in the 1930s. Sent to Auschwitz as a teenager, she lost her parents and other family members in the gas ovens. Veil dismisses Hollywood films like Schindler's List and remains bitter that it took the French state until 1995 to acknowledge that it was the official French government, not some renegade clique of Petainists, that organised the deportation of Jews from France as late as 1944. Yet at the same time, she tells story after story of non-Jewish French citizens helping to hide and protect Jews.
She is critical of General de Gaulle, who covered up French complicity in the Holocaust and openly despised Israel and the Jewish people when he returned to power. By contrast, she has kind words for Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who made her minister of health in 1974 explicitly to make abortion legal and promote women's rights.
Veil is not a campaigner for Jewish causes, but being Jewish is central to her life. She criticises those who apply the term genocide or Holocaust to ugly, brutal violence and killings in the Balkans conflicts or Gaza; she witnessed the Holocaust and knows the difference.
She is a campaigner for Europe, as an ideal and a cause. The British equivalent might be a cross between Shirley Williams and George Weidenfeld. Veil's French is that of the classically trained French intellectual who pares words to fit thoughts as tautly as possible. Something is inevitably lost in translation, but the small publishing firm Haus is to be congratulated on making available in English this account of a great Frenchwoman's life.
If it comes out in paperback, the English for garde des sceaux is not keeper of the seals but minister of justice. But then how does the foreigner translate lord privy seal or chancellor of the exchequer?