Paris: A Love Story (18 page)

For a long time, the French blamed the Nazis for what happened to French Jews. And yet, as early as 1940, the French Vichy government defined Jewish status, barring Jews from all state jobs, including teaching. Vichy France published 168 laws governing Jewish life.

During the 1998 World Cup finals, I learned what a tender subject race is in France. France’s victory set off an explosion of celebrations in Paris, with wildly exuberant crowds pouring into the streets, kissing strangers, and honking their horns until the early morning. It was unlike anything I have ever witnessed in New York. “How wonderful,” I enthused to my French brother-in-law, “to see this multicultural team.” For, indeed, the French soccer team, led by the legendary ethnic Algerian center field, Zinédine Zidane, was the very portrait of a rainbow
coalition. “We do not remark on such things,” my brother-in-law chided me. “They are all French.” This is national policy and you will not find official French statistics on race or immigration. It would run counter to the founding principle of
la République:
the doctrine of assimilation. From the time of the French Revolution, Protestants were given equal status in Catholic France, as were Jews and the children of immigrants. Of course, the black marble plaques tell a different narrative.

•   •   •

Proust was a
Dreyfusard
—a supporter of the falsely accused captain—and I have lately been rereading
In Search of Lost Time.
When I first read Proust, in 1968, I was fascinated by Swann’s obsessive love for Odette—a woman who wasn’t even his type. Proust’s depiction of love as an affliction based on an illusion struck a chord with me in those days, when I was frequently in and out of love. Now I am rereading
Swann’s Way
for what Proust has to say about music, art, childhood, memory, social commentary—the human condition! Thanks to Proust, I do not beat up on myself quite as much for insufficiently appreciating the moment when it was here. (Why didn’t I tell Richard how much I adored him, was changed by him, learned from him each and every day?) That inadequacy is also part of the human condition, as Proust tells us in thousands of pages.

Late one night, as I am reading in my bedroom in the rue des Écoles, a passage strikes a deep chord with me: “Several times in the course of the year I would hear my grandfather tell at table,” the Narrator relates, “the behavior of M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had
watched, day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns’ family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death chamber. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly, M. Swann seized my grandfather by the arm and cried, ‘Ah my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be walking here together on such a charming day! Don’t you see how pretty they are, all these trees, my hawthorns, and my new pond on which you have never congratulated me! Don’t you feel this little breeze? Ah, whatever you may say, it’s good to be alive all the same, my dear Amédée!’” Yes, I agree with Monsieur Swann the elder. It is good to be alive, all the same. Proust captures the fluctuating rhythms of loss that I am daily experiencing—grief crashing against a sudden zeal for life.

This rereading of Proust leads me to that most Proustian Parisian neighborhood, the elegant provinces of the Parc Monceau, east of the Arc de Triomphe. This is another world away from my own neighborhood of schools and bookstores. The lush Parc Monceau was developed by a Jewish banker, Émile Péreire, in the late nineteenth century. The opulent mansions that surround it belonged to the great Jewish banking families, such as the Rothschilds and the Cernuschis, and others less well-known. (In fact
Monceau
is Parisian slang for nouveau riche.) Herzl himself lived at number 8, and Proust lived close by, on the rue de Courcelles. Proust was a frequent visitor to the mansion I am entering, number 63 rue de Monceau. Musée Nissim de Camondo, the discreet brass plaque indicates.

I enter a hyperrefined Proustian world furnished with the carpets, tapestries, and bibelots of the reigns of Louis XV and XVI. I picture glittering soirées in the dining room where the table is permanently set—as if awaiting Proust, Herzl, and the other great figures of the day. It is hard to conjure a more quintessentially French décor than this ode to the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason. But the host and his children and grandchildren are missing. The patriarch, Moïse de Camondo, built this temple to French civilization and left precise instructions that it would all remain untouched, as they left it—the Jewish Camondos’ gift to the French nation. Moïse’s son Nissim, after whom he named his museum, gave his life for France. His plane went down in flames during World War I, when he was shot photographing German military installations from the air.

Nissim’s sister, Béatrice, converted to Catholicism, no doubt assuming that would protect her during the Age of Hate. In her family’s mansion, with its priceless French treasures and its vast collection of Impressionist paintings—all gifts to the French Republic, as spelled out in her father’s will—Béatrice may have felt safe. Her father had been awarded the Légion d’Honneur. He was a founding member of the Friends of the Paris Opera. Marcel Proust, the greatest French writer of the day, was a habitué of their salon. Why leave? So Béatrice did not heed the warning signs, as French police under SS supervision began rounding up less well-placed Jews from their schools and homes. She continued to ride her beautiful horse in the Bois de Boulogne, sometimes accompanied by
a German officer. Until the summer of 1942, when the same people who seized eight children from the École Maternelle in my neighborhood arrived at her splendid house. Parisian officers packed Béatrice and her children into a wagon bound for Drancy. She and her children, Fanny and Bertrand, spent the next nine months in that grotesque antechamber to the Auschwitz-bound trains. (Drancy is just a station en route to the airport now—but an ugly stop in any weather.)

On the morning of March 10, 1943, Béatrice and her children arrived at Auschwitz—from where they never returned. They were the last of the Camondos.

Strolling now from room to opulent room, I marvel at this one-sided love affair. How blindly the Camondos, of Turkish origin, adored their adoptive country! As I drift from the parqueted salon up to the bedchambers, I search for some remnant of their pre-Parisian roots. On the mansion’s top floor, there is a letter from Proust after the death of Nissim in 1917. “J’ai le coeur serré,” Proust wrote with moving simplicity to Moïse Camondo, the fallen soldier’s father. “My heart is clenched in pain.” And, next to it, a book of Hebrew prayers, printed in 1839, and brought by the family from Constantinople to their new home, Paris. In a house furnished entirely with eighteenth-century French antiques, it is the only reminder of the Camondos’ long, ultimately tragic journey.

•   •   •

A small silver-filigreed object once stood in our Budapest dining room sideboard and caught my eye when I was a child.
It was shaped like a castle’s tower, and I thought it was a toy. Then it disappeared. Years later, I saw its duplicate in the Berlin Holocaust Museum: a Jewish spice burner, the only reminder of our origins. My parents, too, had tried the camouflage of conversion and assimilation. Only in America did they find the total acceptance that eluded the Camondos, and so many others, in Paris.

Outside, in the Parc Monceau, a group of first-graders and their two teachers, one of African, the other of North African origin, sit in a circle on the lush lawn. The class itself is a multiethnic palette. Will this early exposure to the “Other” be enough to keep hate at bay?

Richard understood hate and its power to inflame—and the speed with which it can spread from heart to heart, like fire in dry bush. He would chide me if I so much as said someone looked a certain way, whether Slav, or Latin, or Jewish. “What do you mean by that?” he’d ask in an accusatory tone. “You know it always starts with people saying things like that.” Together, we had observed that skilled spewer of hate, Slobodan Milosevic, light the fire under his people. No one did more to put out that fire than Richard. I find comfort in the fullness of his life—and the satisfaction he derived from doing what he loved.

Monceau is a
parc,
and so it is permissible to take liberties with its lawn. The Luxembourg is a
jardin,
where one must never, under any circumstance, have contact with the grass. I know this, as I have stepped on that soft green carpet and had a
gardien
jump out of nowhere and call out, “La pélouse est interdite!”
The lawn is forbidden. His tone implies that any fool must know this. Like the lady in Annecy with her “Mais, il y a toujours Oxford!” Obviously.

The next day, strolling through the Musée d’Orsay, I discover that my favorite paintings are from the collection left to France by the Camondo family: Degas’s
The
Absinthe Drinker,
Monet’s
Nymphéas,
his Rouen Cathedral series, as well as
Parliament Bridge
and Degas’s
Les Repasseuses.

The story of the Camondos haunts me for days. Partly it’s because the Camondo museum feels less like a museum than an elegant home—abandoned in haste. In 1957, after a warning that my parents would be rearrested, we abandoned our own Budapest home in haste. This flight is among my childhood’s most enduring memories. My most cherished possession is the painting of two Hungarian peasants, which once occupied pride of place in our Budapest home. One of the few objects we salvaged, it hangs above the mantel in my New York City apartment.

In my Paris neighborhood, France’s historic fear of the Other is an inescapable fact. People mind their own business—which is mostly something I appreciate, as I do not seek unnecessary social contact just now. After five years, I have not progressed beyond the ritual
bonjour
with anyone in my building but Luisa, the concierge. When I was moving in, I stopped a strapping student who was taking the stairs two by two to her
chambre de bonne
—maid’s room—on the building’s top floor. Could you give me a hand moving this chest, “s’il vous plaît, mademoiselle?” She seemed happy to help, and together we hauled the cupboard to where it stands today. To show my
thanks, I invited her to lunch. We spoke of her philosophy studies and of the concierge, who, she reassured me, I would come to like. I have not seen the girl since.

Indifference to the fate of those not inside their circle is the underside of the French passion for privacy, for
la discrétion.
A country that has experienced multiple invasions and a catastrophic loss of life in World War I has low expectations of humanity, and an understandable fear of
les étrangers
—strangers. “C’est normal,” accompanied by a Gallic shrug, is an expression I hear often. Even death in mid-life is deemed
normal,
something to accept and live with. In New York, death is not
normal.
It is a shocking intrusion into life—a failure. No one in hyperactive Manhattan wants to be reminded of mortality.

Here in Paris, every block tells a tale and cautions the visitor against undue optimism. The past—and death—is so present in Paris because every neighborhood has some sort of a monument to the two million men—two out of every nine—lost in World War I. Every step forward is followed by one backward, the ancient stones of my neighborhood seem to say. I am reminded of that as I sit in Le Café Métro, on the place Maubert. Léon Blum, elected prime minister in 1936, was the first Jew to hold that office. He was driving through place Maubert, where I am sipping my café au lait, when a group of right-wing thugs tried to overturn his car. Did anyone sitting on this terrace move to intercede? Blum was arrested by the Gestapo. He survived Auschwitz, but his brother René did not.

What would have happened to Paris had its citizens resisted the Germans more forcefully? Would it have shared
Budapest’s fate—with every major building and monument bombed? It’s a devastating thought: Notre-Dame pulverized like Coventry Cathedral? Still, Vichy is a name uttered with shame and as rarely as possible by the French.

My reverie is interrupted by a young man with a shaved head who leans over from the next table at the Café Métro to ask, “Can you recommend a good sushi place nearby?” He has an unmistakable Hungarian accent, so I answer in Hungarian. Again, I circle back to the scene at Parc Monceau. Will this exposure to the Other—a Hungarian skinhead looking for sushi in Paris—be enough to douse the next eruption of hate?

•   •   •

No American writer has cast a larger shadow on this neighborhood than Ernest Hemingway. Rereading him now, I am struck by how little actual interaction there is between the author and the people of the city he is most identified with. I too have but a handful of good Parisian friends—family forms the core of my life here. But what a loss in color and interest if Parisians started behaving like New Yorkers.

In
The Sun Also Rises,
the book that made Hemingway famous, and which is partly set in Paris, there is only one exchange between the narrator, Jake Barnes, and a Parisian. She is a prostitute Jake picks up at a café. “I watched a good-looking girl walk past the table and watched her go up the street and lost sight of her, and watched another, and then saw the first one coming back again. She went by once more and I caught her eye, and she came over and sat down at the table. The waiter came up. ‘Well, what will you drink?’ I asked.” Jake is disappointed
at her lack of intellectual sparkle. “I had picked her up because of a vague sentimental idea that it would be nice to eat with someone. It was a long time since I had dined with a
poule,
and I had forgotten how dull it could be.”

Apart from the
poule,
Hemingway’s Paris is populated mostly by Americans. It is a backdrop, a stage set, and a very good place to write. “It was a pleasant café,” he wrote in
A Moveable Feast,
of his favorite, on the place St.-Michel, “warm, and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a
café au lait.
The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story.” Parisians are of no interest to him.