What's left when everything has been taken from you? When one loses a tooth, either it grows back or it is replaced, but when you lose a loved one, they cannot be replaced. You cannot replace one country with another when you have no home. In this piece, Jean-Claude Grumberg asks what it means to have been dispossessed of all the possessions that made a life. In 1942, Charles Spodek fell victim to the anti-Jewish laws and was forced to abandon his dentists practice. He recovered it three years later in 1945, but in the meantime, one of his daughters had disappeared, deported, and the other chose to take holy vows in the convents where she had been placed for safe-keeping during the war. Charles and Clara, his wife, will never see her again. For this atheist couple the news comes as a shock. Gradually, a feeling grows in them that they no longer have a country, and associated to this feeling, a sense that they must go elsewhere... Why not Israel?
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