A Chosen Few (57 page)

Twelve years passed, and Florence happened to visit Rue des Rosiers and saw a bakery called Finkelsztajn’s. She started asking questions. Sacha and Florence were married three years later, in 1985. In 1986 they had a daughter. While Sacha ran the store on Rue des Ecouffes, Florence ran Henri’s store, In 1992 she had triplets, two girls and a boy. A long-range planner, when the children were still infants, Florence had already spoken to a rabbi about doing two bat mitzvahs and a bar mitzvah on the same Saturday.

Henri, with all this commerce and family, had taken on a contented look as he drifted between the cash register and the deli-counter in the bakery. Down the street, Sacha was in charge of non-bakery food—several kinds of herring and different dishes with cheese and spices, and liver, all with the old Yiddish names. As in Antwerp, the Poles who came to Paris after the fall of Communism headed straight for the Jewish neighborhood looking for work. Poles worked for Henri and Jo Goldenberg and any of the Ashkenazim still in the Pletzl. Henri was amused by the irony of it, but on the other hand, after a lifetime of being told he was from Poland, he was at last getting to observe some Poles first-hand.

Finkelsztajn’s favorite thing was when new customers hovered uncertainly over the platters. He explained that they could buy by the gram or in a sandwich. But before they decided, he would tell them that they must try everything. Taking little pieces of bread, he would carefully spread samples on each, handing them one by one to the customer who tasted and moaned with approval while Finkelsztajn smiled his warm, easy smile, a happy man in his trade. He had never wanted to bake bread, but feeding people and listening to them purr was a trade for Henri.

Although everything American had become fashionable in the Marais, Americans were starting to annoy him. When they spoke Yiddish they always used the familiar form. Always “
Vos makhst du
” for “How are you” and never “
Vos makht ir?
” And in any language
Henri was tired of the line, “Just looking”—because they really were just looking. American Jews who had heard there was something Jewish on Rue des Rosiers went to have a look. They examined the small shop and stared up at the mid-nineteenth-century curlicues on the ceiling, and they walked out without buying anything, but what was worse to Henri, without saying anything. If he said something to them, they replied, “Just looking.” Then they walked out, crossed the street, and standing in Front of Journo’s, they would snap a photograph of Henri’s ocher-colored storefront with the scrapes and chips from trucks that tried to go up on the sidewalk to pass parked cars on the narrow street and didn’t quite make it. “The Americans come here as though this is a museum and we are not real people,” Henri complained.

He drifted out of the shop, into the narrow street, and found people to chat with or things to watch. If nothing else, he could watch the oversized trucks scraping away his paint. André Journo was often running nervously between his restaurant and his art gallery, a cigar clenched in his mouth. The spry, tightly wound Mediterranean would fly past the dreamy, heavyset Central European. Their paths crossed a few dozen times every day. But they seldom had as much as a nod for each other. It was not about the difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. It was about real estate.

In French law, owning a commercial space and owning the walls to that space are two separate transactions. Icchok Finkelsztajn, with the money loaned to him by friends in the Pletzl, had only been able to buy the space for his bakery. Henri had later tried to buy the walls, but by then the owner would not sell because he wanted to sell the entire building. The building was run-down, and the tenants were paying 80 francs for an apartment. When the Journo family lived there, they had paid 60 francs. The owner earned barely enough to maintain the building. In 1980 he happily unloaded the building to someone interested in the real estate market. The new owner slowly drove his tenants out and restored the building, selling off the apartments at more than $2,000 a square foot.

At this point Journo had seen an opportunity to get control of the building and asked Finkelsztajn to go into business with him. Henri, by instinct, could not imagine having nervous, fast-talking André Journo as a business partner and declined. Managing on his own, Journo got the art gallery on the ground floor and the Arab
café next to it when the owner retired and went back to North Africa. Then, in the spring of 1992, to Henri Finkelsztajn’s astonishment, he discovered that Journo now owned the walls to his bakery and wanted him out.

The wall owner can evict the space owner at any time by buying out his space. If Journo did this to Henri, he could renovate the space and sell a luxury apartment “in the heart of the Marais.” Because the ground-floor storefront was not well-suited for an apartment, Finkelsztajn was able to talk Journo into taking over only the upper space where Henri had grown up. It was now kitchen space, and losing it meant that he would have to go back to baking in the basement. Almost a half-century after Icchok had sealed up the basement, declaring, “Working in a basement is slavery,” Henri had to reopen it and once again move the hot ovens down below. The bakery ceiling had to be propped up with steel while the work overhead shook the building. And then the Journos moved into what the Rue des Rosiers gossip mill reputed to be the most spectacular luxury apartment in the entire Marais.

E
VEN PHYSICALLY DETERIORATING
from Parkinson’s disease, Chaim Rottenberg poured enormous energy into building his Orthodox community. When Daniel Altmann joined the community, his was one of fifty families. But by the 1990s, a decade later, more than three hundred families were directly involved, and some thousand families followed the leadership of the Rue Pavée synagogue. On a Saturday morning, the tall, elegant, art nouveau chamber was filled with men wrapped in their white prayer shawls, swaying and bobbing and bowing like frenetic bearded angels, periodically resting and gossiping with friends, the Hebrew chanting sometimes barely audible over the conversations in French and Yiddish. Occasionally, a thumping noise from the
bimah
would uselessly try to hush them, while their children ran and wrestled in the aisles and the women chatted and prayed high up on the balcony. The children covered their heads with major league baseball caps and ran playfully between the men’s prayer shawls and took turns to see who could jump high enough to touch the mezuzah on the doorway. It was a large, lively, noisy community.

To a great extent, this was the work of Rottenberg’s own charisma and energy. But it continued to grow after he fell sick. There seemed to be an increasing demand for this kind of old-fashioned
Orthodox community. Many of the people in it, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic, were, like Daniel Altmann, people who had turned away from a secular life. For Altmann it had to do with a need, in modern French society, to feel a sense of belonging, of not being alone. “You have this development in French society,” he said. “People want to put themselves somewhere. You are linked, or you are not linked. But also, it’s like a snowball. When you have a very strong center, things start to grow.”

The community had a committee of elders, and Rottenberg got the idea of putting some younger men on the committee. He had built a diverse community with many younger people, and he wanted them represented too. Altmann became one of two younger men on the committee. Then he became the vice president, then the president died. “You be the president,” declared Chaim Rottenberg to Daniel Altmann. Daniel tried to protest, said that he was too young, that he had young children to worry about, that he didn’t want to get embroiled in “
shtibl
politics.” But no one ever could say no to Rottenberg. Altmann became president. After this, he had Rottenberg to contend with on a daily basis. The telephone would ring at the Altmann house. It was the Rav. He had asked Daniel to raise some funds for a certain project, and a week had gone by and he had not done it. “You didn’t do it because you have money and you think you don’t have to do things because you are rich? You think it is some small thing? Not important! Here, I will put up fifty francs, and I want you to put up fifty francs! I don’t understand! You are ruining this whole thing!”

Altmann spent years being shouted at by Rottenberg. But he also knew him as a compassionate man. He called him a dinosaur, “the last of the man alone who can hold together a whole community.” And while Daniel pursued his religious life, his chemical trading business prospered. Like his grandfather, he found good opportunities in barter arrangements with a disintegrating Russia.

In 1990, Rottenberg’s wife Rifka had a hip replacement operation and was hospitalized for two months. When she was released, Rottenberg’s severe face smiled. “You’re back,” he said, and suggested they take a vacation together to Switzerland. He died while they were away, and their son Mordechai took over the community. “We went on vacation. Then he died,” said Rifka with a laugh she had that seemed almost like crying. “That’s life. But I found fifty years, because I was dead once already.”

P
ARIS BECAME
the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world and the most important in Europe. Although there were an increasing number of Daniel Altmanns, French Jews still tended to assimilate. About a third of Paris Jews considered themselves to be “religious,” although many nonreligious Jews had strong Jewish identities. Florence Finkelsztajn said of her education plans for her four children, “I want them to learn the tradition, not the religion.” But a third of French Jews were marrying non-Jews, although French society continued to point out the futility of assimilation. Mitterrand’s first government contained a number of very assimilated Jews, including Laruent Fabius, who had a Catholic education and took communion. But when the government was announced, the French talked of the “Jewish government,” and when Fabius later became prime minister, he was “that Jewish prime minister.”

In 1987, René Sirat, the first modern sephardic Grand Rabbi of France, resigned. His successor was also from North Africa, from Tunisia. Sephardim or Ashkenazim was no longer an issue that interested many, although differences persisted. North Africans missed their countries. They spoke Arabic and listened to the free-spirited, whooping Arab music. But the Ashkenazim—the few who could remember—had no nostalgia for Poles or Poland. And some traditions remained different, such as the music of prayer chanting. The Sephardim made the Passover dish
charoset
with dates, while the Ashkenazim always made it with apples, and the Sephardim ate olives and didn’t eat horseradish or chicken soup with
knadlech
, matzoh balls. And even in Paris Algerians still grilled lamb the night before Passover because they had each killed a lamb before Passover when they lived in Algeria and owned lambs. Sirat would confess to his family of his one great failing in rabbinical school: When he had studied
kashrut
, each student was required to slaughter a lamb in the ritual way, and he couldn’t do it. He could not bring himself to kill the lamb.

But the Ashkenazim were no longer concerned about the Sephardim taking over; they respected the Sephardic rabbis. On the other hand, some Sephardim, despite their numerical superiority, were concerned about the new Orthodox Ashkenazim taking over. Many Sephardim who had strayed from religion in France were brought back by Rottenberg or the Lubavitchers. This was not in itself upsetting. But when they grew
peots
, put on broad black hats and long black coats, dressing like they were from a shtetl in
Poland, this was disturbing because it had nothing to do with North African Jewish tradition. Some Sephardim wondered why an Algerian would want to imitate the culture of poverty and oppression from Central Europe.

Sirat had resigned as Grand Rabbi because he wanted to return to his true avocation, teaching, and participate in the extensive Jewish educational structure that he had done much to establish. With his soft, compassionate almond-shaped eyes, his black frizzled beard, moving his yarmulke around his head as he searched for words, he looked like a professor. He had a clear message for modern Jews about God’s covenant, the responsibility of “the chosen people.” He warned Jews against self-imposed ghettos: “I think that we must also be a presence in the world, especially in the places where men are suffering or humanity is attacked. Every time that people suffer somewhere in the world, the Jews suffer with them, and they must not remain indifferent to the pain and suffering in the world—not in Yugoslavia, not in the former Soviet Union. We do not have the magic to solve all the world’s problems, but we must not be indifferent. If we are indifferent to the suffering of other people, how can we ask others to be sensitive to our suffering? Because we must never forget that all people suffer, not only Jews.”

E
MMANUEL AND
F
ANIA
E
WENCZYK
were having coffee on a rococo table in their spacious, ornate sixteenth-arrondissement apartment. There was a time when they could not have dared hope that life would turn out this well. One of their teenage grandsons, a son of Lazare and Suzy, was there. The question came up, if Fania had ever regretted her decision in 1945 not to move to Israel. Emmanuel smiled at the question, but his smile was blunted by Fania’s response. “Yes and no,” she said.

The air between them in their gracious living room somehow seemed to stiffen.

“Yes and no.” She insisted on making clear that the look Emmanuel was giving her would have no effect on what she had to say. “No, because I wouldn’t have been married and all, but I do regret not having lived in Israel.”

Emmanuel looked away. Their grandson was watching from a distant couch with bemused fascination.

“If he would agree right now,” she continued, “I would move to Israel.”

“And leave all our children here?” Emmanuel challenged.

“Ah, you see, there it is.”

“You wouldn’t want that.”

“No?”

He shook his head.