The History Behind the Celine Dion Song Based on a Very Jewish Book

My big flex — which is really more a product of circumstances — is that I was a Celine Dion fan before it was cool.

I was a fan before Titanic’s “My Heart Will Go On,” and even before the release of the unforgettable 1996 “Falling Into You” (the album that features the “Wuthering Heights”-inspired break-up song “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” written by Jewish New Yorker Jim Steinman).

It all started when I was an elementary school student at a private Jewish school in Belgium. One of the teachers decided to do a little school performance that included a song from Dion’s 1995 French-language album, “D’eux” (“Of Them” or “From Them,” but also a homophone for the French word for “two”). I became obsessed with the song. I needed the album. Every day, I demanded it be played in the car, in our living room, and eventually, on my Discman.

What that teacher — who I’m not sure was Jewish at all — didn’t realize is that she introduced me to what would become a vitally important Jewish text to me, from one of France’s greatest Jewish singer-songwriters, Jean-Jacques Goldman. The text? My favorite melodramatic ballad from “D’eux”: “La Mémoire d’Abraham,” which in English can mean both Abraham’s memory or Abraham’s memoir/book.

There is more Judaism in the album than one might expect. Goldman, the son of a Polish Jewish immigrant to France who became a member of the French Resistance and a German Jew who settled in Paris, wrote all but one of the songs on this album, and he actually incorporated Jewish themes into the lyrics.

“D’eux” has so many great songs written by Goldman. “Vole,” which was later translated into “Fly” for “Falling Into You,” is a touching song about grief. “If That’s What It Takes” and “I Don’t Know” are the two other Goldman-written titles from that Grammy-winning album. But “La Mémoire d’Abraham” is uniquely Jewish.

Growing up yelling out the song’s lyrics in my bathroom, I was sure the song was about our first patriarch. “Just one prayer, before we obey,” the song opens in French, and automatically made me think of Abraham’s journey to Canaan. I definitely should have examined the lyrics a little deeper, because in it I can also find the traces of my own family’s Jewish story: that of escaping persecution, maintaining Jewish faith, surviving the Holocaust and Jewish hate.

That’s because the song is actually based on “The Book of Abraham” by Marek Halter. In the book, Halter famously explores his family’s partly fictionalized Jewish history for 2000 years, starting when they were expelled from Jerusalem. Halter’s family story mirrors my family’s in many ways. He was born in Poland before the war, like many of my relatives, and he and his parents survived the Holocaust by escaping to Russia and Uzbekistan, like my own maternal great-grandparents. But in this book, he traces the history of Jewish persecution and othering around the world and throughout time, all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition and the Middle Ages. The book became a sensation and was adapted into a French comic book. Goldman had apparently written the lyrics for the song a decade earlier, around the time “The Book of Abraham” first came out, but realized he couldn’t sing the song himself — and instead found the perfect voice and delivery for it in Dion (a singer who is not Jewish, but does love to support good Montreal delis).

Over on Wikipedia, one editor suggested that the song is about the battle of the Plains of Abraham in what is now Quebec City, which makes a lot of sense when you know that Dion is from small-town Quebec and attached to her French Canadian roots, but makes little sense when thinking of Goldman. His lyrics, from my perspective, are very Jewish: “Long is the wait/Heavy is the pain in our hearts/But so big, is our love, our faith in you/But so hard to understand you sometimes.” Those words feel like they are sung towards God himself. For many survivors, it’s hard to juggle our pain and trauma with our faith — but love for tradition wins out.

The song ends with a solemn prayer for the future: “Guide our children, for the end of times/Filled with more joys than tears.”

Like many songs on “D’eux,” “La Mémoire d’Abraham” still gives me the shivers to this day. Even if Celine herself is not Jewish, I love that my favorite singer of all time has a song that makes me feel so seen as a Jewish person.