The Dizzying Journey of the Communist Jewish Activist, Rachel Eckstein. When Reality Transcends Fiction

Abstract

In 2004, in collaboration with the physicist Edgar Gunzig, Élisa Brune published a ‘novel’ entitled Relations d’incertitude (Relations of Uncertainty), a central notion in quantum theory, but which has an obvious symbolic and metaphorical dimension in Brune’s work. The initial project was to write a scientific treatise accessible to the public on the research carried out by Professor Gunzig around the fluctuations of the quantum vacuum as the mechanism at the origins of the universe as well as on the elaboration of the bootstrap model. However, the text soon becomes an examination of the human itinerary of Gunzig, inseparable from his professional trajectory. From the data presented in Relations d’incertitude and other historical documents, my aim is to retrace one of the essential parameters in Gunzig’s life, namely the exceptional trajectory of his mother, Rachel Eckstein, one in which reality often exceeds fiction.