A Chosen Few (31 page)

L
AZARE
B
OUAZIZ
was now a Parisian dentist, and he maintained the religious practices of his father’s rabbinical household in Oran. He was active in an organization that arranged vacations with kosher food and Sabbath observation. The hope was that Jews would meet on these trips and marry. Intermarriage has long been a great threat to the continuance of French Jewry. In 1965, Bouaziz led a group tour in Greece and met Suzy Ewenczyk, daughter of Fania and Emmanuel. Two years later, they decided to get married,
which was to be exactly what Lazare’s organization wanted to happen. The problem was that many Jews saw this match as a mixed marriage between a Sephardi and an Ashkenazi.

To the Ashkenazim, a Sephardi was still a strange and very different kind of Jew. But Bouaziz had been around Ashkenazim for many years and had no problems about marrying one. His parents were not particularly happy about the marriage, but he had a brother who had already married an Ashkenazi, so they were coming to accept the idea. Emmanuel Ewenczyk does not recall the marriage presenting any great problem, but Suzy and Lazare remember it very differently.

“It was a big, big problem,” Suzy said. “My parents were not at all happy.” They did not discuss their unhappiness with her but instead sent friends and Fania’s mother, all of whom carried the message, “It’s not the same thing when you marry a Sephardi. They are good people and well-educated, but it is just not the same.”

I
N
1958, De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic came to power with a new constitution. The minister of culture, André Malraux, a war hero and respected intellectual, began doing what Icchok Finkelsztajn had dreamed of for more than twenty-five years—cleaning the buildings of Paris. Slowly, building by building, Paris brightened into limestone shades of cream and beige. At first it was not even noticeable to Finkelsztajn and the other old guard on Rue des Rosiers, but the new cleaning policy had another side to it that was to profoundly affect the Jews of the Pletzl. Not only were buildings to be cleaned, but the slummy areas in the central eastern part of the city, especially the fourth arrondissement, were to be restored and improved. What Finkelsztajn thought of as the Pletzl, the government called the Marais, the swamp. The area had, in earlier centuries, been a swamp or at least a marshy area along the Seine, providing swans and other wild birds for the feast tables of the aristocrats. But by the sixteenth century the aristocrats had ruined their own game preserve, draining it and building large private homes. The section deteriorated after the revolution, when the aristocracy lost its standing. The rose-garden street became the heart of a crowded immigrant slum.

Now the government wanted to restore the area, buying properties as they became available and renovating them. When a property goes up for sale in Paris, the city has the option of buying at a
fair market price. The market price in that part of Paris was very little for a dilapidated sixteenth-century building, and few but the government had the capital to restore such large, ancient properties. Slowly, the city began buying up the Marais. If anybody was thinking about it, they would have known that a Jewish immigrant-based social phenomenon like the Pletzl was not going to be part of the government’s urban planning.

The Paris face-lift was a small part of De Gaulle’s larger scheme to restore “the glory of France.” This was to be accomplished partly by rewriting history, a Gaullist project that began in 1944, when he persuaded the Allies to let him enter Paris and pretend that the French Army had liberated France from the Germans. De Gaulle had argued that France needed to believe this to restore its pride and confidence and achieve stability. Myth-building also required forgetting not only about the Vichy collaboration but about the role of the Resistance in the war. The war between the Resistance and the collaborators had been a civil war between Frenchmen, and the lynching and even the legal trials of collaborators were, in his view, threatening France with a continuing civil war.

According to the De Gaulle version, World War II was much like World War I, and the French in unison had fought and defeated the Germans for the greater glory of all France. He always emphasized the 1918 armistice celebration and played down anniversaries of World War II victories, in which France had played only a minor role. The betrayals of French Jews by their fellow Frenchmen, the history of deportations, the fact that there were French concentration camp survivors—all that was inconvenient for the Gaullist myth.

Nevertheless, De Gaulle did not have particularly bad relations with French Jews. He was remembered as a leader who had worked closely with many Jews in the fight against Pétain. Politicians did not think about “the Jewish vote,” which to this day is thought to be an American concept. Even on policy toward Israel, the sentiments of French Jews were not a key factor one way or the other. Mendès-France felt that he had to prove that he did not favor Jews because he was Jewish. De Gaulle had nothing to prove, and Jewish interests were not an issue for him.

As it happened, his relations with Israel greatly pleased French voters, Jews and non-Jews alike. There was probably no foreign leader with whom De Gaulle had a better relationship than David Ben-Gurion. France had hated the British Mandate because it was
British, and from the beginning it had been a strong backer of the State of Israel. De Gaulle continued this policy. In 1961, France provided Israel with sixty-two state-of-the-art jet fighters, the Mirage III, and five years later it provided fifty more. First-class French tanks and helicopters were also furnished. If Israel had a military force that could stand up to the Arab League, it was in part thanks to France. No doubt in De Gaulle’s mind, it was entirely thanks to France. The policy made French Jews feel good about their country, but it had the same effect on French non-Jews. France was proud of what it was doing for Israel at a time when France needed to feel proud.

Since De Gaulle’s treatment of his own countrymen was marked by almost unbearable paternalism, it is not surprising that he treated poorer, weaker nations the same way. It seemed that since France had supplied the arms, it should be able to tell Israel how to use them. When on May 22, 1967, the Egyptians decided to block the Gulf of Aqaba, De Gaulle and his military advisers determined that this was not a serious threat to Israel. The Israelis, however, saw it as the first step in a joint Arab war against Israel. Rather than wait for what they were certain would be a coordinated military attack, they decided on a preemptive air strike. While Arab leaders were once again talking about the destruction of Israel and the massacre of Israelis, the President of France forbade Israel to go to war and announced an arms embargo to the Middle East. On June 5, when the Israeli air force began to obliterate the Egyptian air force, De Gaulle was furious.

From the perspective of French Jews, a war of extermination against Israel had begun, and France was not only refusing to help, it was embargoing. A fundraising committee quickly formed under the Baron Guy de Rothschild, so quickly that no one stopped to think that French Jews had never launched such an emergency fund drive before. Tightly organized demonstrations were immediately planned. To the Ewenczyks, there was nothing new about demonstrating for Israel, only this time they were really worried. If Israel did not get help quickly, the entire population, they feared, would be massacred. Their daughter Suzy marched with Lazare. Men in the Pletzl got shots and medical certificates and prepared to go fight in Israel. Henri Finkelsztajn marched with his father, Icchok, and with most of the people in the neighborhood. Chaim Rottenberg, the anti-Zionist troublemaker from Antwerp, organized his own Orthodox contingent and marched them to the mass
show of support that was building in front of the Israeli embassy. Daniel Altmann, a wealthy seventeen-year-old student with no religious feelings at all, demonstrated and helped with the fundraising drive.

Each group had leaders with portable walkie-talkies to coordinate movements. An estimated 100,000 people brought Paris traffic to a standstill for hours in front of the Israeli embassy. Standing there 100,000 strong, Jews suddenly realized that French Jewry had changed. The North Africans had more than doubled the Jewish population of France to 650,000, almost twice as many Jews as before the war. It had become, after the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel, the fourth largest Jewish population in the world. And now it was a population that was speaking out.

The Jews may have been surprised by their own numbers and the effectiveness of their organization, but De Gaulle was astounded. Even when Israel triumphed in only six days and most French cheered the Israeli victory, he turned French foreign policy away from Israel. In a November press conference called to explain the new policy, the French president reflected, “Some people even feared that the Jews, hitherto dispersed but remaining what they have always been—an elite people, self-assured and domineering—might, once reassembled on the site of their former grandeur, transform into ardent and conquering ambition the very moving wishes that they had been formulating for nineteen centuries: ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ ”

Jews reacted with shock and fury to the statement, and that surprised the general too. When Grand Rabbi Jacob Kaplan told him that his statement had been anti-Semitic, De Gaulle seemed baffled, insisting that it was a compliment. Possibly it was. The whole thing resembled a kleptomaniac revealing his suspicions of thieves. De Gaulle himself was elite, self-assured, and domineering. Put in Ben-Gurion’s position, he might very well have succumbed to all kinds of ambitions. The notion of a people returning to “former grandeur” was pure Gaullism, a phrase he frequently applied to France. But at that moment a new generation of French Jews changed their mind about their parent’s World War II hero, Charles De Gaulle.

Nothing was going to ever be the same again. The Jewish community noticed that they were now sizable and could organize and be heard. The Sephardim had brought a new militancy along with a new population. If nothing else, never again would a deputy be
able to stand up in the National Assembly and shout “
Sale Juif
” without hearing a huge outcry in response.

F
RANCE’S
“ ’68” had begun. It began in most places in ’67 or even a little earlier. It is difficult to understand exactly why, but 1968, like 1848, was a year of spontaneous combustion. The year 1848 had seen similar rebellions for similar reasons in similar countries, but it is more difficult to find a pattern to 1968. In the United States the reason for the rebellion was opposition to the Vietnam War. In Paris and Berlin the Vietnam issue was thrown in as an extra course. French students were tired of the essential myths of Gaullism, a system that had dished out half-truths in the shape of platitudes as their future grew ever more bleak. More than half a million Frenchmen could not find jobs in 1968. Under De Gaulle, these students had seen the economic boom of their childhood slowly evaporate. The Paris movement was loosely related to similar student protests in Berlin and Rome. The Italians started with university issues and ended by protesting the venality of society. In Spain students demonstrated against Franco. The Basques became militant, revived their language, and founded the armed group ETA. In Berlin students started by protesting the way the university was controlled and then moved to protesting the capitalist press monopoly, but ultimately they protested a corrupt German society that could not grasp democracy because it was founded on lies. Young people started asking what their parents had done and what they had not been told in school.

At the same time, Czechs, not just students but government officials, were turning away from the Soviet model, much as the Hungarians had tried to do, and they were realigning Communism with the ideals that had made it attractive in the first place. Polish students, carefully watching Prague, wanted the same.

But all these uprisings had a spontaneous quality, starting with smaller issues and growing to increasingly broad intellectual concepts. Perhaps the one thing they all had in common was that the generation had been raised on a glossy version of the horrors their parents saw. The first nuclear generation, who had spent their childhoods from Budapest to California learning to go into the shelter and cover their heads when the bombs that would destroy the earth were dropped, were coming of age, and they felt that their parents had swallowed too many lies. For young European
Jews, there was another issue: Why had their parents not resisted the Nazis more? Why had Jewish communities cooperated in deportations? Why, in 1961 at his trial in Jerusalem, was Eichmann, who negotiated with Jewish leaders for the orderly deportation to death of their people, able to assert when asked about his conscience that he had never encountered any opposition to what he was doing?

In Paris many of those who had demonstrated for Israel in 1967 also demonstrated in May 1968. Not coincidentally, many of the same organizational techniques, such as walkie-talkie communications, were used. Daniel Altmann, after demonstrating for Israel, had his curiosity piqued enough to spend time on an Israeli kibbutz. But he returned to demonstrate in May. Henri Finkelsztajn, a thirty-year-old high school dropout, also demonstrated. What had begun as a demand for coeducational dormitories was now a general protest backed by the major labor unions.

One of the leaders of the student movement was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German Jew whose parents had returned to Frankfurt in 1949. He was called Dany the Red both for his politics and for his very unsemitic-looking red hair. A kind of folk hero in France, for years afterward French journalists would look him up in Frankfurt and ask him how he became a student radical. “What was the turning point in your life?” asked André Harris and Alain de Sédouy, the team who had written the celebrated 1970 Max Ophuls film on French collaboration,
The Sorrow and the Pity
.

“It was the war,” said Cohn-Bendit.

“World War II?”