A Chosen Few (29 page)

Most of the buildings remained dilapidated, the blackened facades broken by fissures and wandering cracks, some of the buildings buttressed by huge wooden beams. The Finkelsztajns’ apartment above the bakery seemed spacious in comparison to most of their neighbors’. Large families stuffed themselves each evening into little studios. The other side of the Finkelsztajns’
building, the side with the carp store, was particularly deteriorated and dirty. Soon the carp store gave way to a small café owned by a Polish non-Jew. It catered to a poor alcoholic Polish clientele who got very drunk and often violent. Because the café lacked space, the fights usually took place in the street. From time to time the dead body of a Pole would be found in the hallway of the building. The police would come and remove it without asking many questions. A dead Pole on Rue des Rosiers didn’t even make an item for the newspapers.

In the 1950s the café was taken over by a Belgian Jew who ran a small restaurant and whose son became one of Henri Finkelsztajn’s neighborhood friends. Henri had a happy childhood in the Pletzl, and the bad years were behind him, perhaps only recalled in a nervous stutter that held him back in school.

Small Orthodox storefront prayer rooms,
shtibls
, began reopening, but they rarely had the two dozen men that would make them seem full. Henri and his neighborhood friends were not religious but attended weekly instruction in a small Talmud-Torah on Rue des Ecouffes. They, like the Ewenczyk children, were among the fewer than three thousand Jews in all of Paris’s sizable Jewish population who received this modest form of Jewish education. Henri and his friends also belonged to a Zionist youth organization, which to them was more of a social club than anything political. Growing up in a crowded neighborhood with narrow streets, they needed a meeting place.

A
T THE TIME
when Mendès-France decided to cut loose the French protectorate of Tunisia, Roger Journo, like his father before him, was a successful cloth merchant in southern Tunisia. The Journos were Jews in a country where Muslims and Jews did not mix socially but worked together and seldom had conflicts. The Tunisian nationalist leader, Habib Bourguiba, valued the hundred thousand Jews in the protectorate and tried to keep Jewish leaders informed on negotiations with France for Tunisian independence. Bourguiba told Tunisian Jews personally that the independent Tunisian state would guarantee the equality and citizenship of Jewish Tunisians. Some Jews believed him and even worked for the independence movement. But Journo feared that if things turned out badly after independence, it might be difficult to get out. In 1951 he gave up his good life in the sunny Mediterranean port town of
Sousse, where one in five people were Jewish, and moved his wife, two daughters, and two sons to one of the smudged little damp and badly heated apartments on the bad end of the Finkelsztajns’ Rue des Rosiers building. Only on rare days would they get sunlight through their three small garret windows on the top floor. They bought a small storefront across the street from the apartment and sold Jewish food. But with the exception of three or four other North African families, none of the Jews on Rue des Rosiers had ever before seen such Jewish food—olives, hummus, tahini, couscous, and halvah. Not a gefilte fish or a herring in sight, and not a word of Yiddish. The neighbors on Rue des Rosiers found these too to be very strange Jews.

More of them were coming. French North Africa had a population of a half-million Jews. Morocco alone had some 285,000, mostly impoverished or struggling peddlers and craftsmen. After Israeli statehood in 1948, a wave of poorer Jews emigrated to the new Jewish state from both Tunisia and Algeria. In Oujda, Morocco, a mob attacked the Jewish quarter during the 1948 Middle East war, killing more than a dozen people and wounding many more. More than a third of Morocco’s Jewish population, mostly the poorest, emigrated to Israel. These emigrants sent reports back to Tunisia and Morocco of a hard and sometimes dangerous life, and few Jews were interested in following this first wave. After independence the new Moroccan government kept its promise to treat Jews fairly and even appointed Jews to ranking government posts. But the new country had virtually no economy, and with Moroccans sending back troubling reports from Israel, the remaining Jews began an orderly three-decade-long retreat to France.

Algerian Jews never called themselves Algerian. Algerians were Arabs. These Jews, though they had been in Algeria since the Spanish expulsion, considered themselves French, which was legally correct since 1870, when the
décret Crémieux
had granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews. Adolphe Crémieux was a passionate nineteenth-century advocate of French revolutionary idealism who had championed the abolition of slavery. He successfully argued that extending citizenship to Jews in Algeria was the overdue fulfillment of the rights granted other French Jews by the French Revolution. They were simply thought of as French Jews. In fact, Algeria was thought of as part of France. Mendès-France, after getting France out of its bitter colonial war in Vietnam and dropping Tunisia and Morocco, balked at Algeria. “Algeria,” he
said, “is France and not a foreign country.” There was enough anger about his “giving away” Tunisia and Morocco that he never could have discussed doing the same with Algeria; it would have been seen, as he himself said, as an attack on “the unity and [territorial] integrity of the Republic.” Instead, France had to fight one of its most divisive and brutal wars before finally letting Algeria go.

Algeria had three almost completely separate populations—the Muslims, the French, and the Jews. The war for Algerian independence was a war between Muslims and French in which Jews were caught in the middle. The National Liberation Front, the FLN, hoped that Jews could serve as mediators in its bid for independence. Some Jews among the intellectual class were militant members of the FLN. Others served in the French Army. To most Jews, it was time to take their French citizenship and move to France. But for all their talk of being Frenchmen, many were reluctant to leave Algeria and move to a strange, inhospitable, and cold northern country.

Lazare Bouaziz, son and brother of rabbis, was born in 1933 in Oran, Algeria’s second city and a major center of North African Jewry. Up until the independence war, the only anti-Semitism he had ever experienced was during the wartime Vichy regime, when the
décret Crémieux
was withdrawn and Jews were expelled from the schools. In 1954, like many Algerian Jews, he went to Paris because the educational opportunities were too limited in Algeria. He studied dentistry and planned to establish a practice in Oran. But when he went back, it was as an officer in the French Army at war with Algeria. He, like thousands of other Frenchmen, had been drafted and was sent to Algeria from 1960 to 1963, where he served as a dental surgeon in the medical corps. The radicals of the FLN would plant bombs and ambush. The extreme right wing in the French military would torture and murder. The violence became increasingly gruesome, and Lazare, in a French uniform in his native Algeria, could only watch. But he still hoped that this would all pass and he could remain in Algeria when his military service ended. His family, like many of the Jews of Oran, was divided on whether to stay or leave. His parents wanted to leave. He and two of his sisters wanted to stay. Algeria had been good for Jews. It had been bad during the Dreyfus case and Vichy, but the bad times had always been caused by a problem in France. This too was a French problem that could pass, and life could go on for the Jews and the Algerians.

On June 1, 1962, Algeria became independent. One week later, an Arab mob went into a berserk killing frenzy in the Jewish section of Oran. “It went on all day,” said Lazare Bouaziz. “They killed and killed and killed.” That ended the debate in the Jewish community. The Jews left, and their synagogues were turned into mosques. Six months later, Bouaziz was discharged from the army and moved to France.

To Bouaziz, Paris was a familiar city, but for many Jews from Algeria it was a strange place with inhospitable people and unfriendly ways. As the European Jews received a small measure of success and moved from the Pletzl to better neighborhoods, North African Jews took their places. They also moved into the garment district as well as the garment trade. The area around Rue Bleue became a Sephardic ghetto, as did some of the new suburbs north of the city.

In retrospect, hardly any Ashkenazim recall any problem with the Sephardim. But the Sephardim remember it differently. “The Sephardim complain to an extent that I find unfair,” said Henri Finkelsztajn. His neighbor Roger Journo’s son André said that at first, “the Ashkenazim took us for Indians. They called us
shvartze
.” In Yiddish, a shvartze is a black. They were Africans. The Sephardim—who were so proud of their Frenchness, their perfect mastery of the language—were perplexed by the fact that these people with heavy foreign accents looked on them as the foreigners. Even when they came from such noted centers of Jewish scholarship as Bône, they were regarded in Paris as ignorant third-worlders from a primitive backwater.

On Rue des Rosiers, the Sephardim went to Sephardic stores and the Ashkenazim to the Ashkenazic stores. There were people who ate couscous and people who ate knishes. The café that a Belgian family had taken over from a Pole was now taken over by an Algerian Muslim and became a hangout for Sephardic youth. To the Finkelsztajns and most of the other Ashkenazim in the building, these teenagers were “
voyou
,” juvenile delinquents. It was an unwelcome element. Several times the police raided the café for drugs. Suddenly, the Ashkenazim were concerned that in this dilapidated space where, not long before, drunken Poles had been leaving knifed corpses, something unwholesome was now going on.

I
f such things can be preordained, the Finkelsztajns seemed fated to be bakers. Even if he didn’t have to work in a basement anymore, Icchok Finkelsztajn still had not wanted to be in a bakery. Now his son, Henri, was working there with him. Although talkative and sociable, Henri’s stutter had made school difficult, and he stopped his education at age 15. Icchok wanted his son to do something better and sent him to apprentice in the garment district. Looking for a way out of the bakery himself, Icchok bought a small hotel on Rue de Rivoli, the wide boulevard nearby. But it did not make a profit, and Henri gave up the garment trade to rescue the hotel.

More by instinct than design, the hotel was run like a casual family boardinghouse with a small group of regulars who were charged low rates. One of the regulars was an American soldier whose life’s dream was to own a store, even though he seemed incapable of navigating through simple arithmetic. The soldier bought anything with francs that he could sell for dollars. It seemed to Henri that almost everyone cheated the American on the exchange rate, but the rate was so good that the soldier made money anyway. Eventually, to his great excitement, the soldier opened his first store in Fontainebleau, near U.S. Army headquarters, and he invited Henri to look. It was an American supermarket—something unknown in France at that time. Henri was
amazed by all the space, the aisles, all the different products and the little metal wagons for wheeling purchases around the store. Henri, who had always thought this American incapable of doing anything, could not help but be impressed by this huge orderly market. It also made an impression on the U.S. Army, which called the soldier in for a talk about his sideline and then sent him back to the United States.

The Finkelsztajn hotel did not fare much better, and it soon closed. Henri went to work for his father in the bakery once again. He hated the work as much as Icchok, but he enjoyed being with his father, whose rippling muscles and good spirits betrayed a love for physical labor that Henri had not inherited. In 1958, Henri married Honorine Paul-Jean, who was from Madagascar, the end of the earth his father had talked about running off to only seven years earlier. Neither Honorine nor Henri claimed to be religious. Nevertheless, because Honorine had only one Jewish grandparent, they worried about their children being legally Jewish. Honorine submitted to the long, arduous process of religious conversion. They named their son Sacha, after the little brother of Henri’s mother, the boy shot in the road near Kielce by the Nazis.

T
HE SONS OF
R
AHMIN
N
AOURI
, a famous rabbi from the Algerian city of Bône, started working at the Klapisch carp store on Rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais. They did not think the carp business was very interesting and, instead, they decided to sell smoked salmon. Although this is a traditional Ashkenazic food, lox, it was not known on Rue des Rosiers because the people there were too poor to afford it. Non-Jewish French people knew nothing about smoked salmon, either, except for a handful of the elite, who paid dazzling prices. Buying a German machine that sliced and wrapped, lowering the price just a little, the Naouri brothers believed that
saumon fumé
could become one of those French luxury products like lobster and foie gras for holidays and birthdays. They got the trade unions to buy enormous quantities for union galas, especially New Year’s Eve. Soon every blue-collar union worker in Paris associated
saumon fumé
with holiday extravagance.