Maggie Paxson

Anthropologist Maggie Paxson says her book The Plateau is about studying peace, which is a hard thing to do, she says. She attempts it via people who take in strangers. It is about a seemingly unusual area of France where locals have sheltered refugees to protect them from evil forces. For ages, apparently. It is a very attractive premise. But it’s’ not true. The Plateau is instead a very personal journey back through World War II and the Holocaust, interspersed with Paxson’s own memories and the letters and other evidence of a relative (Daniel Trocmé) who helped fugitive children and ended up at Buchenwald.

It is a memoir, not science. I say that because Paxson is a recognized anthropologist and that’s why she was there (at least nominally). She has spent years in Russian villages, learning how their societies work. She takes on Le Chambon Sur Lignon in France with these credentials under her belt. But she gets deeply and personally involved with the locals, the immigrants, their children, their hopes and their fears. She translates for them with government agencies (She speaks English, French and Russian). It’s all very personal. The anthropology turns out to be an excuse to find her own roots.

It’s very cathartic for her. Paxson describes all of her many phobias. We learn about her miscarriage, and all her childhood memories, relevant or not. Like the time lied to her mother about climbing on the bathroom sink. It turns out she has lived in fear and guilt since childhood. She says she’s afraid of nearly everything. All the more amazing that she could pack herself off to remote Russian villages for a year at a time.

She tells us about her singing, and the history of Bei Mir Bis Du Schoen, a favorite song she ends up singing with the locals in France. Everything she sees brings back memories of her own life in Rochester, NY or in Russia.

The Plateau is an area in the Massif Central of France, southwest of Lyon and St. Etienne. It is high up, cold, thickly forested and sparsely populated. It is remote enough that governments haven’t bothered it much. It was in the news in recent years for an ugly murder of a girl student by a boy student. It happened because the boy was expelled from his previous school for rape, but the Plateau school didn’t know that, because they didn’t ask. Everyone there seems to look only forward, and what’s past is past. Paxson was there at the time of the murder, and felt it deeply, as did everyone. It put them on the map – the top story for weeks – and it hurt.

The whole book is felt deeply. There is a great deal of religion and a common god, communing with ancestors and latent appreciation of relatives. It is a total purging by Paxson, an American who got her PhD in Montreal, her husband in Europe, her bona fides in Russia and her awakening in central France. Mostly, she got to recreate the life of Daniel, who descended into the depths of the Nazi holocaust, despite not being Jewish. Harboring children was sufficient. He did it in Le Chambon Sur Lignon. Coincidence?

The descriptions are endless, microscopic, spiritual. The smells of country air, the feeling of snow, the damp, the cold, the homefires, the people in the streets and on transport. All the different international cultures in this little village. It is a long, involved story, constantly flipping among the three poles of Le Chambon today, her own history and the recreation of Daniel’s short life (He died at 33).

The history of the Plateau plays only a minor role beyond Daniel’s time there. The way the area evolved to take in fugitives does not get examined much, and certainly not deeply. Locals did take in fugitives during the war, and they do take in registered asylum seekers today, but what makes them do that could be in the air or the water and we don’t know. Paxson stops asking early and instead absorbs the ethos of the place. The book ends in Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in Daniel’s name and honor. For Paxson, it brought out her Jewish side (her mother is Jewish).

It’s an emotional rollercoaster of a memoir, but it is not social science and it answers no questions for the rest of us.

David Wineberg… (mere)