Adam Wizman and Valérie Berdah (Sarah) marriage

Adam Wizman’s marriage to Valérie Berdah, later known as Sarah, is a relationship transformed by fear, migration, and incompatible understandings of religious life. Their shared response to antisemitic violence first binds the family together, but the move it prompts does not bring lasting security: after returning to France, the couple’s daily life grows more constrained and emotionally distant, until Adam leaves for Claire Farel and the family is divided across continents.

A family shaped by violence and migration

After earning a degree in modern literature at the Sorbonne, Adam took a teaching post in Toulouse, where he met Valérie, a dental technician. They married six months later and had two daughters. At Valérie’s request, the girls attended a Jewish school. The family’s life changed decisively on March 19, 2012, when an Islamist attacker killed three children and a father at the school. Adam and Valérie took their daughters out of school immediately. Like relatives and friends shaken by the attack, they began to consider leaving France, confronting the possibility that Jewish life in Europe could remain exposed to lethal antisemitism.

Adam understood the attack not as an isolated shock but as a threat to continuity. He had long been drawn to Georges Perec’s novel A Void and told Claire that Jewish tradition associated creation with letters: remove one letter from the Bible’s original text, and its meaning changes. He connected Perec’s constraint of writing without the letter “e” to the possibility of Jewish disappearance. Until the attack, he had accepted the saying that one could live happily as a Jew in France; afterward, he decided that the family could no longer rely on that assurance.

The family moved hurriedly to Ra’anana, Israel, where they rented an apartment for six months. Adam felt a deep attachment to the country but found that living there would require a kind of personal alteration he could not accept. The everyday atmosphere felt aggressive to him, and the closeness he sometimes experienced with other Jews while traveling did not translate into a sense of belonging among Jews in Israel. He was also troubled by what he saw as the political disengagement of fellow French emigrants, particularly their acceptance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an unchangeable reality. The family returned to France disappointed by the failed move. Adam then took a French-teaching job at a Jewish school, and family life became more enclosed within the community.

Religious practice and growing estrangement

After the return to France, Valérie turned toward stricter religious observance. She stopped using the name Valérie and began calling herself Sarah. Her clothing changed: she wore long skirts, loose long-sleeved tops, and a headscarf, and she sought to observe dietary rules, Shabbat, and the laws of family purity more closely. Those rules restricted physical contact between spouses during menstruation and required ritual immersion afterward. During the period of separation, Sarah slept on a mattress on the floor. Adam objected to this arrangement, which became one concrete sign of the widening distance between them.

For nearly twenty years, Adam had remained faithful to a wife who supported him and cared for their daughters. At her request, he sang a traditional Friday-evening song honoring the virtuous woman. Yet the household’s religious rhythms no longer gave him a sense of shared future. He came to feel that he was living with a stranger, without desire or prospect, and that his marriage had become a form of confinement. The novel presents their divergence not as a simple contest between faith and unbelief, but as a conflict between different ways of carrying Jewish identity: Sarah’s increasingly observant domestic practice and Adam’s humanist and political unease.

The family’s vulnerability was renewed in January 2015, when the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes killed civilians and police officers. For three days, Adam stayed at home with Sarah and their daughters, with the shutters closed, unable to work. The shared experience of danger reinforced their bond even as their private marriage was failing. Adam had grown up with the conviction that Jewish identity carried obligations to preserve a people; leaving his household therefore seemed to him not merely a private decision but a possible betrayal of communal survival.

Separation and its immediate costs

Adam’s relationship with Claire Farel sharpened the contradiction between the marriage he had maintained and the life he wanted. He felt that his attachment to Claire had changed how he understood himself, but leaving Sarah also meant risking shame and exclusion from the community. For months he resisted committing to a departure. The recent attacks intensified the family’s sense of shared fate, and Adam did not tell them he was leaving until a year into his relationship with Claire.

Before making the announcement, Adam imagined that Sarah might cry, insult him, threaten to keep him from their daughters, or seek help from a rabbi, friends, relatives, and community members to reconcile them. Instead, she refused to speak to or look at him. She moved through the home without acknowledging him, leaving him with the impression that he had become invisible to her. The following day, she told the director of the school where Adam taught that he had left her for a non-Jewish woman with whom he had long been having an adulterous relationship. Adam was dismissed from his job.

He packed a suitcase and went to join Claire in a Paris hotel room. Within days, the two rented a furnished apartment in the city’s thirteenth arrondissement and began living together. Their new relationship initially concentrated their attention on one another: they declined invitations, drifted from friends, and treated their mutual availability as a reason to remain apart from the wider social world. That intimacy did not erase the practical and familial consequences of Adam’s departure. His loss of work, Sarah’s continued life with their daughters, and the family’s prior history of migration all remained part of the cost of the separation.

The daughters and the continuing family division

The consequences extended into the next generation. After Sarah moved with the daughters to New York, their older daughter Mila could not tolerate the religious environment and controls on her clothing, movement, and thinking. She arrived at Adam and Claire’s home in Paris with a suitcase. Her arrival interrupted the couple’s brief period of seclusion and made the effects of Adam’s separation immediate within their new household.

Sarah later made a life in Brooklyn with a man from an Orthodox Jewish background; they had a son, and the younger daughter lived with them. Mila had little contact with her mother and described feeling guilty because Sarah blamed her for joining Adam in France, telling her that the family would have remained intact if she had stayed in the United States. Sarah was in Paris visiting Mila when the events that would become central to the novel took place. Their family history therefore persists not as a settled division but as an active source of loyalty, blame, and distance.

Significance of the marriage

The marriage connects the novel’s account of private separation to larger questions of Jewish belonging, safety, and ethical responsibility. The 2012 school attack and the 2015 terrorist attacks make the family’s fear historically grounded; the migration to Israel, the failed attempt to settle there, and the return to France show that safety and belonging do not align neatly. Adam’s departure is also shaped by his fear of communal stigma and by the loss of the stable family structure he had tried to preserve for his daughters.

The relationship is marked by reversals: the couple’s shared response to danger does not prevent their separation, and religious practice that once formed part of family life becomes associated with a distance Adam can no longer bear. Sarah’s refusal to acknowledge him after he announces his departure gives the breakup its own stark form, while his dismissal from the school demonstrates how intimate choices can carry institutional consequences. Their marriage ends as a shared household, but its history continues to shape where their daughters live, whom they trust, and what each parent understands as betrayal.