Only a Jewish Woman Could Write a Dystopian Novel Like This

On its surface, there is nothing particularly Jewish about the French novel “I Who Have Never Known Men,” whose English translation has been experiencing an unexpected surge in popularity this past year despite being published last century (that is, in 1995). 

Jacqueline Harpman’s sparse dystopian novel centers on a group of 40 women living in an underground bunker for reasons unknown — to both the women and the reader. What we do know is that a rotation of male guards keep the women in check, providing food and enforcing bedtimes that may or may not have to do with the typical 24-hour day. And we know the narrator was the only child taken into the bunker; the other 39 women were adults, many with families and children they were separated from. None of them can quite remember what happened that fateful day they were captured — the narrator was too young to recall; the other women suspect they may have been drugged. All we get are hazy memories of screaming, panic, fire and something terrible afoot.

This all might sound par for the course for the genre. Many modern readers have compared “I Who Have Never Known Men” to Margeret Atwood’s feminist dystopian books, her most famous being “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Many suspect that the book’s sudden popularity, thanks in large part to enthusiastic readers on BookTok, could be tied to the current political climate, the same reason the aforementioned “Handmaid’s Tale” struck a nerve (and the best-seller list) decades after its publication.

But learning about Harpman’s own background, a more specific picture starts to come into focus, if not on the page, then in the subtext of the story. 

Harpman was born in Belgium in 1929, and her father, Andries Harpman, was Jewish. In 1940, when the Nazis began their invasion of Belgium and Jacqueline was 10 years old, her family fled to Casablanca, Morocco. There, as the Forward reports, they faced institutional antisemitism. Harpman recalled a particular experience at age 13 of attending a lecture by a fascist French politician who made “a torrent of vile remarks against the Jews” that she regretted not denouncing. When the war ended in 1945, her family returned to Belgium. She was 16.

While not quite as young as the unnamed narrator — who the women simply refer to as “the child” — was when first taken into captivity, knowing Harpman experienced such an upheaval to her life under the threat of extinction at a young, formative age surely seems to echo some choices in the book.

And of course, the bunker itself, with its foreign enforcers and cruel conditions, easily harkens images of the Holocaust.

In an afterword for a 2019 reissue of the book, Sophie Mackintosh writes of the women’s approach to the inevitability of their death: “The narrator admires those who have died calmly, facing the terror, unafraid. It is human to be afraid of death, of unimaginable pain. And it’s another kind of humanity to transcend it.”

Mackintosh goes on to directly connect that approach to death to Harpman’s experience with the war. “There are echoes of concentration camps in the senseless cruelty of their confinement, the endless cracking of the whips of the mysterious prison guards, the sickening inevitably, as they discover, over and over and over, that everyone else on the planet imprisoned in the same way as them, has perished. And for what?” she writes. “We are kidding ourselves if we think of these cruelties as unique to a fictional alien planet.” 

But the part that I can’t stop thinking about is what happens to the women when they are able to escape.

When sirens start blaring at the exact moment one of the guards is unlocking the portion of the bunker the women are kept in called “the cage,” their circumstances change in a remarkable way: The guards vanish, and they are free.

Or are they? 

Emerging from the bunker for the first time in what the women assume to be at least a decade or longer, they find themselves in a land they don’t recognize, a barren expanse with no sign of civilization. They wonder if they are even still on Earth. 

As they begin a journey searching for signs of life, or any path of return to normalcy, or just a clue as to what actually happened to them, they are granted few answers. Any shock and joy at being able to escape is soon subsumed by still more dire questions: How can they continue to survive, and why should they even try?

“There had been so much hope when we’d escaped from the prison, and then the slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle,” the narrator says. “We were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.”

I think of the Jewish families, like Harpman’s, who escaped one country, only to experience more antisemitism in another. The Jews who fled Poland and sought salvation in the Soviet Union, only to be put in one of Stalin’s gulags. I think of the families who eventually were able to return to their home countries to find it unrecognizable — their synagogues destroyed, their once lively shtetls decimated, their culture, history and languages gone. And I think how any survivor of the Holocaust anywhere was made to continue living in a world that allowed such an atrocity to happen.

Prisons, cruelties, horrors — you might think I am talking about an exceptionally dark book. But what actually makes “I Who Have Never Known Men” so remarkable to me is the way in which it left me feeling not depleted, but invigorated. There is a string of hope throughout, and a reminder that at the core of our humanity is the will to live, and to seek connection while doing so. Our narrator, though nameless, is not soulless. She is brimming with ideas, curiosities, compassion and plans. She may be one of the only few people left in existence, but to the end, she will continue to ask questions, even if she’ll never get her answers.

It’s no surprise that a Jewish woman who narrowly evaded one of history’s darkest moments infused her protagonist with so much light.