Panic Room, released this year by Columbia Pictures, repeatedly shows television monitors bearing the Sony brand Sony, of course, owns Columbia. Another Columbia offering due out in the US next month, Men in Black II, will feature advertisements for Mercedes and Rockport shoes, both products with major roles in the film.. When Marcel M?g was eight years old, he rushed home to tell his mother about the game he had been playing in the basement of a block of flats. “I said, ‘We discovered the gold of the Jews.’ And my mother said, ‘What do you mean? You are a Jew.’ ” M?g smiles “I didn’t know what a Jew was I remember crying, ‘But I don’t want to be a Jew. I want to be like everyone else.’ ”
When Marcel M?g was eight years old, he rushed home to tell his mother about the game he had been playing in the basement of a block of flats. I want to be like everyone else.’ ”
M?g’s maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust. His mother survived because she was smuggled to the Netherlands, where a couple adopted her.
Like many Dutch Jews after the war, she did not draw attention to her past.But for her son it altered everything. “That notion of not knowing what you really are will never leave you. It profoundly affects the way you look at life.” M?g pauses, lights up a cigarette. “It’s an experience everyone should have.”Not knowing who you are haunts the work of M?g, considered one of the Netherlands’ most important writers. His books have a philosophical weight, bursting with references to Wittgenstein, the Kabbala, the Bible, The Iliad, the Talmud. Even Elizabeth David gets a name check.His novels resonate with a sense of loss Memory, identity, absence are his themes.
If the past is another country, M?g understands our need for border crossings. “I’m a romantic,” he says, “but I do have a melancholy disposition I’m not an optimist. I don’t believe things will get better.”Although M?g won’t be pigeonholed as a Jewish writer, he admits his fascination for memory and time stems from his family circumstances “We were a very small family We hardly had any relics .. no photographs or family heirlooms. It felt like we were dropped as aliens into society in the Fifties. We had to build our own history.”What it sharpened up in M?g himself was that classic writer’s position of the outsider looking in It also led to a dislike of groups.