82 Jackie 1930–1962
At the end of August, an offi cial from Harvard told Derrida that
he had found a job as an au pair for Marguerite in Cambridge,
Mass. So Marguerite could obtain a work visa and go to America
with Jackie. But in order to pay for her crossing, she had to borrow
money from a female friend. In the Aucouturier family as in the
Derrida family, the announcement of the departure of Marguerite
and Jackie caused quite a stir.
Michel, Marguerite’s brother, had just returned from a year in
the USSR: only now did he discover the situation and he could not
conceal a certain malaise:
I was taken aback to learn that the engagement with Laurent
Versini had been broken off. I felt partly responsible.
Furthermore, Jackie had written my parents a long letter that
had really annoyed them: instead of asking for Marguerite’s
hand in marriage in the traditional way, he set out in detail his
very free conception of relationships within a couple. Although
he was an old normalien, my father had his quite traditional
sides. He was not best pleased to see his daughter heading off
with this young man.^5In El Biar, in the Derrida family, the situation was even more
delicate. Marguerite’s daily letters fi nally roused the interest of
Derrida’s parents. But Jackie waited until the last moment to tell
them that their relationship was serious and that Marguerite would
be sailing to the United States with him. The announcement of this
quasi-engagement with a young woman who was a ‘goy’, a complete
outsider to their world, caused a considerable stir over the next few
weeks. Everyone got involved, starting with René, Jackie’s older
brother, who did not seek to conceal his hostility for the planned
marriage.
A maternal uncle, Georges Safar, sent Jackie a letter that greatly
irritated him. Even though his uncle assured him that he desired
‘neither to approve nor disapprove’ of what his nephew was doing,
he did want to have a good talk to him when he came back from the
United States, to tell him ‘what his conscience, his aff ection, and his
experience forced him to say’.^6 There is no doubt that the religious
question lay at the heart of his remarks: in the Safar family, as in
the Derrida family, endogamy was less the rule than something
that just went without saying; you married within your milieu, and
often even within the same part of town, as René and Janine had
done. But ever since his teens, Jackie had distanced himself from the
Jewish community and could not stand the idea of anyone trying
to trap him in it. A few days later, he wrote his uncle a letter that
seems unfortunately to have disappeared, though one can guess that
in it he reacted point by point to his letter, without letting a single