A Chosen Few (28 page)

The two-tier economy was becoming unbearable for East Berliners. Prices were much cheaper in the East, especially with West German marks worth far more than East German marks. In fact, East German marks weren’t worth anything outside of East Germany. East Germans like Mia Lehmann who had no interest in going to the West would go to their neighborhood store or hairdresser and be told that their money was no longer accepted. With West German marks being offered, no one wanted the low-value eastern currency.

A
LL OF THESE TENSIONS
were hardening the regime, instilling the “us or them” brand of official paranoia, making the state increasingly insistent on conformism and increasingly distrustful of rebellious individualists. Georges Alexan’s teenage daughter Irene was not fitting in.

Her father had remarried, to an outsider in their circle of outsiders. She was a German, not Jewish, not from abroad. Irene, resenting her, had divided the world into her father’s world, which she loved—Jewish and American—and her stepmother’s world, which she hated—gentile and German. She continued to insist that she was Jewish, and her father continued to be ambiguous. The day before Christmas, he would hand Irene some money and tell her to buy a tree. She would run out to the street, buy one, and bring it back. But neither of them knew what to do with the tree. Her
father went back to reading, back to his customary posture, bent over a book with his hat on.

Irene’s rebellion grew. She dropped out of school and later took a lover, ironically a non-Jewish lover, and became pregnant at 18. Her father didn’t want them to marry, because they seemed an obvious mismatch. A classic parental mistake, his opposition fueled their determination.

She had a job in the East German news agency, where her skill in English was valued, though she mostly distributed English-language copy to the right desks. As she went through the office reading copy, she made comments with that New York brand of irreverence that had become her style. These were not times for irreverent pregnant teenagers in the GDR. She was informed that she was a “bourgeois leftist revisionist” and that she needed to be reeducated. This was to be accomplished by sending her to work in a factory assembly line.

Factory work? She had never done anything like that. She had grown up among the privileged Communist elite. She didn’t even know people who worked in factories. Wandering East Berlin, 18 and pregnant, she contemplated the fact that for the first time in her life she was not going to be in a privileged position. She was not going to be in the vanguard, not a Soviet freedom fighter—she was going to be a faceless German in a factory.

And then someone came to her and said he was from the government and that he understood she was scheduled to go to a factory because she was a bourgeois leftist revisionist. She said that was true, but she didn’t want to go, that she was a good Communist and she didn’t know what had happened. The man’s face glowed with a hospitable smile. “If that is true, if you are right, if you are a correct person, then maybe we could work together.” He explained that he would appreciate having conversations with her, not very often, just from time to time. Maybe once or twice a year. She could just talk about what she thought was going on, her views on people and events in the office, and these would be secret conversations that no one else in the office would know about.

Now she would not have to go to a factory. She would do undercover work! She liked that idea. It seemed like the guerrilla fighter of her childhood fantasies exposing the Nazis.

That summer of 1961, Irene gave birth to a boy, Stefan. Alone, she took her new baby home to her small apartment on a quiet war-scarred street of Mitte. Her street was quieter than usual that
night, and she was feeling very alone with her baby, whom she was not exactly sure how to care for. Soldiers had erected a makeshift gate at the entrance to her block, and she had to prove that she lived there before she could pass through. To Irene, that meant that she would be alone with the baby. Visitors would not be let into the block—unless they came from the other direction. But when she looked down the block, it appeared to be completely closed off on the other end with swirls and tunnels and spirals of barbed wire suspended between new concrete posts. It looked like some kind of military construction project winding through the center of the city. The border was closing.

T
he majority of French, both Jews and non-Jews, had a deep-seated desire to pretend that World War II never happened. Most French Jews went back to being Frenchmen. Just as before the war, they were a diverse group, not well organized, and usually attached to the French Republican ideal of fitting into France. They spoke out from time to time, as happened during the Finaly affair, but they were not a political force. Nor did most of them want to be. Among French Jews it was widely believed that when Jews hold political power, it always leads to trouble. In 1954 the French government was headed by Pierre Mendès-France, an assimilated Jew who once proudly asserted, “I do not remember ever making a decision in my political life—and even less so in government—inspired by the interests of the Jewish community.” Yet when he resigned as head of government after a controversial seven months and seventeen days, during which he had withdrawn France from Indochina, started the autonomy process for Tunisia and Morocco, and won French ratification for the rearmament of West Germany, his final speech to the National Assembly was shouted down by deputies screaming
“Sale Juif!,”
dirty Jew. The Jewish community had little reaction. Emmanuel Ewenczyk fatalistically explained, “When a Jew is in a highly responsible position in France, there is always some anti-Semitism heard.”

Emmanuel and Fania Ewenczyk had two daughters, one born in
1945, and one two years later. Emmanuel had kept the business in the Jewish garment area in the center of Paris. But as it prospered, he and his family moved to western Paris, to the sixteenth arron-dissement, where they had the kind of ornate Paris home that is surrounded by swirls—in oriental carpets, in gilded molding on the furniture, in bas-relief on the walls and ceilings, in chandeliers, and even etched in the crystal. In one generation they had been able to rise from poor eastern immigrants in the garment district to the assimilated grand bourgeois life like that of the Altmanns.

The Altmanns were raising three children in a nearby western Paris neighborhood, an area of manicured streets and grand turn-of-the-century buildings with sculpted detail. The steel trading business had to be carefully managed in a fast-growing but unstable world marketplace, and their lives as affluent Parisians, not much different from non-Jews of their economic class, had resumed. Once a week, a rabbi would come to the children’s school and teach them Hebrew for one hour. Such things were important, but they were not the center of life.

The Ewenczyks sent their children to an afternoon Jewish school, a Talmud-Torah, for a few hours a week. But their passion was Zionism, not religion. Atypical of French Jewry, the Zionists were organized and rented huge Parisian halls for mass rallies, which Fania and Emmanuel always attended. Emmanuel was consumed with his fast-growing business, but Fania missed the activism of their Resistance days. Most of their old Resistance group from Grenoble was now in Israel. In fact, most of the real activists in French Jewry, the ones who wanted to remember and did not think life could be put back the way it had been, had gone to Israel.

Less than ten years after the war, the Jewish population of France was approaching the 340,000 prewar population. France had opened its borders to Jewish refugees, and 55,000 DPs moved there. The immigrants gravitated toward the Pletzl or the Rue Bleue area, but French Jews lived throughout Paris, often not in Jewish neighborhoods, sometimes almost clandestinely. Wartime experiences had convinced many Jews to change their names to French ones. Many times more Jews changed their names between 1945 and 1957 than in the century and a half between 1803 and Nazi occupation. In towns and villages where a mere name change could not hide a family’s origins, there was an unusually large number of conversions to Catholicism.

T
HE
P
LETZL
, after losing so many people to deportation, never regained its original size. It was now only Rue des Rosiers and the few streets running off it. But new people were moving in. One of the first new groups, after the 1948 Middle East war, was the Egyptian Sephardim—strange Jews for the Pletzl, who spoke perfect French but no Yiddish and didn’t eat the heavy potted food of central Europe.

The neighborhood always smelled of food. Inexpensive restaurants, like the ones before the war, opened in the narrow storefronts, the steam from dense Polish Jewish cooking drifting out doorways. In the 1950s these restaurants often closed after only a few months because of a lack of customers. In time, people learned that the Pletzl was now a smaller place and could no longer support a restaurant in every third door.

Horse-drawn ice wagons struggled down the narrow streets past black marketeers who bought silverware and gold and sold U.S. dollars. Next to Finkelsztajn’s bakery was a shop not much wider than a doorway that sold live carp from a tank. Across the street from Finkelsztajn’s, on Rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais, a block-long street off of Rue des Rosiers, an Ashkenazic family, Klapisch, opened a second carp store. A delivery truck would get to the corner and scoop out the scaly amber fish in big nets, dumping them into the tanks of the two stores. Young Henri Finkelsztajn would wait for the truck to leave and then run to the gutters, where he would find small carps that had slipped through the nets, smacking themselves uselessly against the curbstones. He would gather them up and bring them to his parents.

One block east of Finkelsztajn’s, on the corner of Rue des Ecouffes, was the Korcarz bakery, with the same blue tile mosaic front, still owned by Icchok’s Aunt Leah and her husband. In the 1950s, Korcarz’s brother, a camp survivor, arrived and opened another bakery on the western end of the street next to the Blums’, whose
charcuterie
was the last of the original Alsatian Jewish shops. Korcarz’s brother was still a traditional religious Jew, and his bakery was one of the few strictly kosher shops in the Pletzl.