The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (18 page)

Without money for a hiding place in the countryside, they remained in Paris throughout the war, wearing yellow Stars of David that identified them as Jews. They had little money, food, or heat, but they survived.

Every day, Rosenfeld wears a badge of honor in the left lapel of his jacket: a small red rosette that signifies his status as an
officier
of the Legion of Honor. But that was not the emblem he wanted to show me now. “I always have with me—” His voice stopped in mid-sentence.

He opened his wallet and pulled out something wrapped in clear hard plastic: a six-pointed yellow cloth badge with the word
Juif
in faux Hebrew lettering. Bits of black thread hung from the edges where the badge had once been sewn onto his clothing.

The Nazis forced Jews in Germany and its allied and occupied territories to wear identifying badges of shame. In France, the order took effect in the spring of 1942. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was moving forward, and Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, French commissioner for Jewish affairs and a fanatical Nazi loyalist, announced that Jews would be required to wear yellow badges on the left side of their outer garments. Violators risked severe fines and imprisonment.

I had seen stars like this at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum and memorial in Jerusalem. But up close, this one seemed huge. Rosenfeld laid it in his hand and turned it over to reveal how it had been sewn. He smiled and lifted it in front of the left pocket of his suit jacket to show how he had worn it as a child.

“I am an old man, and when I die, I want to be buried with it,”
he said. “I’m not even observant. But I wore it every day to school until the end of the war. It has never left me. It’s part of my life.”

Rosenfeld was quiet, then said, “There’s still ink on it, from when I was at school.” Indeed, the star was stained with tiny splotches of black. The fountain pen he used as a child and kept in his jacket pocket must have leaked.

AFTER THE 2015 TERROR ATTACKS
, Rosenfeld joined a massive march of upwards of 1.5 million people in Paris to show unity with France, to honor the memory of those who had died in the attacks, and to defend the freedom of the press. Many marchers carried signs saying “
Je suis Charlie.
” Rosenfeld saw that a small number of marchers wore signs that proclaimed something different: “
Je suis juif
.”

He thought back to the grenade and machine gun attack on Chez Jo Goldenberg, a Jewish restaurant on the rue des Rosiers in the Marais, in 1982. He was working for Prime Minister Mauroy back then, and arrived at the scene within thirty minutes. “I am a citizen of France,” he said. “I believed it then and I believe it now.”

As a Holocaust survivor, he is not afraid of the rising anti-Semitism in France. “I understand that some Jews are worried,” he said. “It is mostly the Sephardi. They didn’t know the horrors of the Holocaust the way we Ashkenazi did. And many of them don’t feel like they belong to France the way I do. I have complete confidence in my country.”

Was Rosenfeld wrong in his assessment of the new anti-Semitism? Was he getting too old and weak to fight back? Or was it that, as a French Jew who had stared down death as a boy, he was determined to embrace life until the end of his days?

His optimism recalled Émile Zola’s upon attending the wedding of the thirty-one-year-old banker Albert de Rothschild and his eighteen-year-old cousin Bettina de Rothschild at the Grand Synagogue of Paris. The synagogue, which had recently opened, was filled with tropical plants studded with red and white roses. As the grand organ played, hymns and chants were sung in Hebrew. “You can have no conception of the beauty of the singing,” Ferdinand de Rothschild, Albert’s brother, wrote in a letter about the service. The couple took their vows before a crowd of people from French high society, including politicians, business magnates, aristocrats, diplomats, and even royalty. More than two decades later, the atmosphere would sour. Zola would risk his future to defend Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer who had been falsely accused and convicted by an anti-Semitic military court of selling secrets to Germany. But on this glorious day in March 1876, Zola was hopeful.

“Seeing Paris, filled with wonder and respect, crowding into this synagogue, I thought of one thing, the hatred to which the Jews had been subjected during the Middle Ages . . . ,” Zola wrote in a column for a Marseille newspaper. “But it must be added that time has marched on, that civilization and justice have gained ground.”

CHEAPER THAN A PSYCHIATRIST

. . .

Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.

—M
ARC
J
ACOBS

T
HE PRESSURE WAS ON. ARIANNA HUFFINGTON WANTED
to shop, but time was running out.

I won’t pretend that Arianna, the head of the Huffington Post Media Group, is a close friend. We had met only once before, when I interviewed her just before the launch of the French version of the
Huffington Post
. She had hired Anne Sinclair as its editorial director, a brash move. Sinclair, a veteran French journalist and the heiress to an art fortune, was better known as the stand-by-me wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund whose hopes of becoming president of France ended the day a chambermaid in a New York hotel accused him of sexual assault.

Arianna hadn’t wanted to answer all of my questions about Anne. But we had bonded as fellow journalists and mothers of daughters, and had struck up an e-mail and telephone relationship. Now she was in Paris again, she had looked me up, and we
were having brunch at the Café Marly, in the Louvre. She had brought along her younger daughter, Isabella, a student at Yale, and I had brought along my younger daughter, Gabriela, a student at Washington University. As we ate in a dining room of satin and velvet luxury, Arianna and I decided it would be fun to take our daughters shopping.

We had only an hour to shop before Arianna and Isabella had to head to the airport. Complicating matters was that it was Sunday afternoon, and France has laws limiting most Sunday afternoon shopping. The aim of the ban is to protect small merchants with small staffs that cannot or choose not to work on weekends. So both big stores like Galeries Lafayette and small, big-name boutiques are closed. An exception is made for shops in designated tourist areas—like the top of the rue des Martyrs in hypertouristy Montmartre. I told the chauffeur to take us there.

The goal was to find something pretty and French for Isabella. Gabriela decided that we would try Maje, a trendy shop that is part of a small French chain with original, flattering, if overpriced clothes that appeal to younger women. The chain had not yet opened in New York, so Arianna and Isabella didn’t know it.

With her tall, lean body, Isabella was easily transformed into a lovely
parisienne
. She walked away with two dresses and a top. Arianna was so pleased that she insisted on buying something for Gabriela, who chose a fitted, short-sleeved cherry-red top with a jewel neckline and a flared bottom. It remains one of her favorite articles of clothing.

After this we had only fifteen minutes left, but I wanted Arianna to find something special for herself. Feeling confident, I led her into a world of adventure and chance that comes with
going secondhand. Taking my friends to secondhand shops on and around the rue des Martyrs is at the top of my must-do-in-Paris list. It comes before my tours of pretty, small gardens; lesser-known churches; and hidden corners of the Louvre. I love the feeling that comes with finding a well-tailored, decades-old navy gabardine jacket with a “Made in France” label (usually dating from the years before much of French clothing manufacturing moved to Hong Kong and China) for the price of a double espresso. Even more, I love consulting with a team of personal shoppers who enjoy good conversation and appreciate my passion for the hunt.

The four of us headed to the very top of the rue des Martyrs, to a secondhand clothing shop on the corner named Chinemachine. We were a world away from Didier Ludot, whose museum of a shop at the Palais Royal sells meticulously curated haute couture. Reese Witherspoon, Catherine Deneuve, and Sofia Coppola are among Ludot’s clients.

At first glance, Chinemachine looks like just another low-end secondhand shop. Racks of clothing and shoes mix with vinyl LPs, bangles with papier-mâché maps of the Paris Métro, odd bits of fur, sunglasses. A patchwork of nude and fashion photographs is taped to the wall behind the counter, along with a note that says, “We’re cheap, so you don’t have to be.” (In other words, no bargaining. You’re already getting a great deal.)

But at Chinemachine, you don’t have to sift through mountains of awful clothing that smell like mildew, dust, and mold in the hopes of finding a 1960s tango dress for under fifty euros. Here, every item has been steam-cleaned and pressed by a special machine. Clothing is color-coded and organized on racks according to type. There are always tango dresses.

The boutique is owned by Martine Chanin, a thirty-something American with a natural feel for business and an even better eye for fashion. A New York City native, she moved frequently with her family as a child, went to college (as my husband did) at SUNY Binghamton, in upstate New York, and settled in Paris in 2003 to study French language and civilization at the Sorbonne.

Long-haired, olive-skinned, tall, thin, and confident enough to wear a leopard-patterned jumpsuit with stiletto boots, Martine is one of the braver of the American women who have made their lives in Paris. She started out slowly. For five years, she lived in a dark apartment infected with black mold. “I would scrub all the black mold off the walls and it would be back in a week,” she recalled. “But the apartment was cheap and I was working nights in a bar with no work papers, so it didn’t really matter.”

She began collecting good-quality, reasonably priced vintage clothing from sources in New York. She stored her treasures in garbage bags and plastic bins in her tiny apartment. Eventually she quit her night job, teamed up with a partner, and then opened Chinemachine on her own, taking over a 325-square-foot, low-tech space that had been a contemporary art gallery.

Launching a business as a foreigner proved daunting. She paid one lawyer what she described as a huge sum of money only to discover, when she arrived at the immigration bureau in the Prefecture of Police to collect her work papers, that she was very, very illegal.

“They said, ‘You need to get out of here,’” she recalled. “They said, ‘You need to get on a plane and go back to New York or wherever you’re from and get a visa for your business, and then like in six months maybe you can come back.’ And I was
like, ‘Nope, ain’t gonna happen. I just started this business. No way in hell I can leave.’

“So I got a new lawyer. And the new lawyer said, ‘Get married.’”

Which she did. She married her Swedish musician boyfriend, whose citizenship in a European Union member country gives her the right to live and work in France.

Unlike high-end consignment shops, called
dépôts-ventes,
which take items on spec, Martine pays cash or gives credit for everything. “Taking clothes from individuals on a direct cash payment basis is an American concept that didn’t exist here,” she said.

And unlike low-end secondhand shops, which often buy in bulk, Chinemachine rigorously examines every item before accepting it. The goal is to sell cheap and fast. “You can do high-end, but you really have to know what you’re doing,” she said. “So I get it in, get it out. Constantly bring in new stuff with bargain-basement awesomeness.”

One cultural divide was that many French women, despite their reputation as avant-gardists of fashion, are quite conservative in their dress.

“I’m shocked at how unimaginative women—even young women—are when it comes to fashion,” she said. “Every time French girls try on something different, they’ll say, ‘You have to be daring to wear this!’ I’m like, ‘Well, then dare!’ I feel that the store brings a little element of surprise. And maybe, hopefully some teenager is going to come in and be like, ‘Yeah, maybe I really just want to buy weird stuff that costs five euros.’”