PART TWO—
PASSENGERS IN TRANSIT

4—
Internal Migrations

Migration for most was first internal, that is, cultural, and preceded the physical departure. On the whole, the Jewish communities of Poland and Russia were beyond the reach of the Emancipation, which, from the second half of the eighteenth century, determined profound transformations in western Europe (including Germany). Nevertheless, even they were not immune to the changes that affected the surrounding societies. From the mid-nineteenth century on, demographic growth, the development of industrial activity, and urbanization modified the socioeconomic structures of the Jewish world. Until then composed essentially of artisans and small tradesmen, the Jewish population contributed broadly to the constitution of new classes, including the working class, the liberal professions, and the industrialists. Moreover, if the Haskalah movement, a product of Enlightenment philosophy, spread belatedly into Poland and Russia, it assumed specific forms there. Its adherents ( maskilim) were aware that the diffusion of their ideas in Hebrew or Russian remained confined within narrow limits. The use of the vernacular Yiddish and the criticism of the conservatism of the communities, as well as the affirmation of a certain conception of Jewish identity, gave their movement a very different character from the emancipation of the French or German Jews: confessionalism in the west opposed secularization in the east.^[1]This was the context for a remarkable phenomenon, the flourishing of an original culture, yiddishkeit, which would be so brutally severed by genocide .

These changes occurred very unevenly, however, varying with the

[1] Rachel Ertel, Le Shtetl, p. 151.

groups and the places. Thus the eastern European Jewish world between the two world wars presented an extraordinary diversity: orthodox believers, Hasidim, more or less devout traditionalists, atheists, militants of several political movements (Zionists, Marxists, etc.). Not all of these upheavals are echoed in the memories we have collected, but certain critical moments resurface, and we can discern traces of them in the narratives.

Education

Memories relating to the heder are most often accompanied by a harsh judgment of the education given there. This is the traditional type of school where children from the most modest homes studied from the age of four or five: they learned to read and write and received an introduction to Hebrew as well as to biblical texts. School? That's a very grand word: the teacher ( melamed) taught in one room, even a corner, of his small dwelling. Portraits of him are hardly flattering. They emphasize his "primitive" methods, his brutality, and his ignorance, and gladly dwell on his more ridiculous characteristics. Just as our schoolboys like to recall memorable escapades, former heder students still laugh about the tricks they played on their teachers. One of the jokes mentioned several times (another quasi-folkloric subject): those rascals attack the unfortunate melamed's beard, which they paste or cut or scorch!

Georges F.:

You came to heder if you wanted to learn. It wasn't compulsory. In the room there was a big table and two benches, girls on one side, boys on the other. About ten families sent their children. It was the only way to learn to write because we didn't have the right to go to school. Indeed, there wasn't any. I don't remember seeing a school built in my village during my childhood. A generation later, yes; that is, seven or eight years later, they built a school.

Me, I had a rabbi, a poor guy. He was nasty as a rash and beat the children like devils. That rabbi had a daughter and two boys. One boy was sick, with tuberculosis. He was there, lying

there all the time, a young man of about twenty. He would spit. To bring children to that place, in the same room, with that guy with tuberculosis, you wonder how we didn't get it . . .

That rabbi was paralyzed on one side. He used to get so nervous and mad. With kids who were almost savages, he had good reason to get nervous. He stood behind the kids with his stick, and every now and then, with his good hand, he gave us a whack on the back because we didn't answer well. That wasn't so bad compared with others who had both their hands. But there were kids who got their ears pulled off, yes, he pulled an ear so hard he pulled it off. That's how he mistreated them.

Once we decided to revolt. You know what we did to him? He had a big beard. One day, he fell asleep on the table, like this. [Georges imitates him. ] We glued his beard to the table and set fire to it. All the kids, not just me. The guy work up smelling his beard burning.

The scene changes, however, with the Jewish school networks that developed in Poland between the two world wars. The diversity of their orientations reflected the heterogeneity of the population. The Agudat Israel network (568 establishments for boys, in 1937, and 71,000 students) remained loyal to orthodoxy; that of Tarbut (267 establishments in 1935 and 42,000 students) was devoted to the teaching of Hebrew, in a Zionist spirit; while that of C.Y.S.H.O.^[2](170 establishments in 1935 and 15,000 students) was inspired with a Yiddishist and socialist ideal (which, in itself, had several political variants in the Bund and the leftist labor Zionists).^[3]In the Tarbut schools, as in those of the C.Y.S.H.O., the curriculum included "modern" subjects (secular languages and literatures, the sciences, etc.), the use of Polish being limited to subjects like Polish history and literature. Pioneering pedagogical methods were practiced there (particularly in the Yiddishist schools), and our informers remember them with gratitude .

[2] Agudat Israel, a cultural and political movement that developed among Ashkenazi Jews and sought to preserve Orthodoxy against secularist and Zionist trends. Tarbut, Hebrew educational and cultural organization that developed in eastern European countries between the two world wars. Centrale Yidishe Shul Organisatsie, Central Organization of Jewish Schools.

[3] R. Ertel, Le Shtetl, 253–264.

Lazare M.:

I went to heder maybe for a few weeks, until I learned the alef bet, being very small. You started heder when you were four, but the methods weren't. . . . The teacher, the rabbi, knew nothing of psychology or pedagogy.

Until the age of ten, I went to a modern school that was only moderately religious. You learned to read and write Jewish subjects. It was a private school, overseen by an association.

Then, in 1920, when I was ten, they opened a Jewish high school. My uncle, my father's brother, was a teacher in that high school.

"Is he the one who ran the heder?"

No, that one was my mother's sister's husband. He was an old man, with a beard, who barely knew how to write, but he did have a head for Talmud. The other one was a high school teacher who had himself finished school. So he said to my father: "Listen, give me your boy." And he took me into the high school, where I stayed until 1929.

Jewish subjects were in Hebrew; the others were in Polish. The first degree in Hebrew was granted in 1929. That was my class. Until the fourth year, the boys and girls were separate, and then it was mixed. They called it a coeducational high school.

I still remember what I wrote for my matriculation in Hebrew. My subject was Mendele and Sholem Aleichem. Mendele is satire; Sholem Aleichem is humor. Satire and humor aren't the same thing. Humor is gentle; satire is bitter. That's what I developed. My examiner became a very important man in Israel, Dr. Tartakover. He's a Jewish historian, a professor of history in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. He's eighty years old now. He came to Paris three years ago. I have a friend here who knows Tartakover. I said to him: "Listen, I have to see Tartakover. I want to show him something." It's my Hebrew diploma. I still have the original.

You had to pay to go to that high school. The students were rich. I think I was the only poor one there, because of my uncle. There weren't any scholarships, but there was something called

fraternal aid. All the students contributed every month. A little later on, I started tutoring. When I was in the sixth class, I could help the boys in the fifth and earn a little money. To get a degree was hard for a poor kid in Poland.

This year, on April 3, 1980, there was a reunion of the former students of the Jewish high schools of Kalisz. Two hundred people came. From Argentina, the United States, Sweden. From France, there was one person; I would have been the second. But at the last moment, I couldn't go. It still hurts me. I didn't go. Everybody was waiting for me. My classmates were there, or one class next to mine, a year more or less. And I didn't go.

Bernard P.:

I went to the Hebrew high school of Kalisz. Unlike the Tarbut high schools, the language was Polish but there were courses in Hebrew and even instruction in the Bible. Aside from that, it was a high school that conformed to all the same rules as at the state high schools in Poland.

In high school, I spoke Polish; with my friends I spoke Polish; I read Polish books. At home, I spoke Polish. My father generally answered me in Yiddish. But I didn't speak Yiddish. I spoke and read only Polish. It's not that I didn't want to speak Yiddish, but let's say that, in the generation of my friends, we all spoke Polish. My mother spoke Polish well, quite well, whereas my father had some difficulty speaking it. He preferred to express himself in Yiddish.

Helena G.:

When I think of the education I got in our school, I haven't yet seen a school that gives such an education. That's so even now, after forty years have passed. Back home, the teachers with the children, it was . . . you just don't see that today. Now, after all the years, when we see someone from our school, we're like brothers. We are brothers. We had a special education in our school. Maybe not everybody became a writer, but their behavior, their manner of being, was different. They always felt self-confident. First of all at our school, they freed us from our

inferiority complex. If we didn't like something, we could say so aloud. They talked to us of hygiene, sexual questions—at that time!

In the Polish high schools, the number of Jewish students was limited in practice by a quota. The Jews often found themselves in a hostile environment. But there too the education seems to have been incomparably more interesting than that of the heder. Indeed, those high schools appealed to those who aspired to modernity. Many parents, eager for their children to climb the social ladder, made not only material sacrifices but also serious concessions with regard to religious principles (going to school on Saturday) in order to allow them to study within the state system. A typical example is young Julien K., whose father was director of a Yiddishist school in Chelm. He did not study in the latter but rather in the Polish high school.

A Passion for Reading

The thirst for learning is a subject that recurs in several memories. It appears frequently in the narratives of those who, being too poor, were forced to work from the age of twelve or thirteen, though they would have preferred to continue their studies. Traditionally, study represented one of the most highly valued activities in the Jewish world. But, henceforth, the thirst for learning went far beyond knowledge of the sacred texts and turned to secular subjects. It provided a vast audience for the fruits of Yiddish culture, broadly disseminated by newspapers, networks of libraries, and theatrical performances. The example of Julien K. seems significant here too. After studying in the Polish high school, he became a full-time radical and then learned to read Yiddish in order to study the works of Borokhov (who attempted to work out a synthesis between Marxist analyses and the Zionist ideal). That's not all. Several translations into Yiddish made known the great authors of foreign literature, notably such French writers as Balzac, Victor Hugo, Zola, and Jules Verne. This is how the adventures of Phileas Fogg came to play a determining role in the intellectual development of Yacob-Jaques L., whose conception of the world was suddenly turned topsy-turvy.

I went to heder at the age of four. First we learned the alphabet. I stayed there a year and a half, I think, and then they took me to another rebbe, who was already teaching a little bit of Bible. Then, when I learned almost the whole Bible, they took me to a third one, who started teaching Talmud.

I was the last of eleven children, and my mother wanted me to become a rabbi. OK, I'll be a rabbi. It went on like that until the age of fourteen. Then, I don't know how, somebody made me read Jules Verne's book Around the World in Eighty Days in Yiddish translation. You know, at the end, he says that Phileas Fogg was wrong about the day because he had traveled in the direction the earth turned. What kind of story is this? The earth doesn't turn—it's the sun that turns around the earth. You remember, when the Hebrews had to enter Jericho before sunset: it's written in the text. Moses stopped the sun. So I asked myself: "Who's telling the truth?" I knew that Jules Verne was a very good writer, a great writer. I said to myself: "It can't be, because Moses stopped the sun; he didn't stop the earth."

Two or three years before, they had established a modern school in our village. There was a teacher there, a young man of twenty-five. One day, I went to see him and I said: "Listen, this is driving me crazy. Help me. I want to know who lied to me. Is it my parents and all the Jews of the town who lied to me? Or is it Jules Verne who's lying to me?" He laughed: "Your parents and the others didn't lie to you, they didn't know themselves." And he explained the solar system to me: the planet Earth is only the third. He told me how it turns around the sun; he talked to me of Mars. Then he lent me an astronomy book in Yiddish. I didn't understand everything, but I read it.

Georges F.:

They sprouted like mushrooms; they were incredible. If they had had the opportunities we have now, geniuses would have come out of Poland. There were writers in our village. They sent for artists, great artists, from Warsaw. There was Schwartz, Maurice Lamp. There were great artists from Warsaw, the summum of the Jewish theater. They came to us and gave shows.

With the will to learn that the young people had, culture developed very fast. But in spite of all that, they really didn't have any opportunities. If they had been given greater opportunities, you would have had extraordinary children, geniuses.

Modernization, Secularization

This thirst for secular knowledge, then, led to doubts about the received wisdom handed down by tradition. From then on, the lost world assumed a more ambiguous aspect in memory. Nostalgia for childhood does not preclude a clear, even severe judgment of the poverty rampant in the shtetl as well as in the big city. Memories are registered within a global interpretation of society and history in which the notion of archaism, even primitivism, is logically opposed to modernity. The latter takes the form, first of all, of material progress, which for Georges F. corresponds to moving from the country to the city. The transformations of his childhood village illustrate the progress of civilization.

Then the village started to expand. There was a factory that moved in, a foundry, for stoves, which did very well. That attracted a lot of workers, and things improved. They started building a bridge to provide access to the railroad station. That was already technology starting to advance. The village was growing and even became a junction on the Polish railroad.

Little by little, a few more Jews came. Maybe eighty or a hundred families moved in, in all the trades: tailors, merchants, etc. And since the streets were beginning to be paved with sidewalks, they set up shops, little wooden huts. A baker went into business. He was a Jew and was already beginning to sell on credit. The village grew so fast that it almost became a center. Then a factory, a very big weapons factory, moved in and attracted a lot of people. But Jews didn't have access; Jews weren't allowed to work there. The factory was almost clandestine, with cellars. It brought a sense of well-being to the village. Little by little, it became a town like all the others in Poland. The tree trunks in the middle of the street disappeared; we had sidewalks, brick houses.

[ . . .] One could find all kinds among those who came with

the expansion of the village. All those who had known us from the beginning were friendly to us. They lived in harmony with the old-timers. But all those who came. . . . That factory brought some wealth and also the Polish intelligentsia. Since there were nice woods and magnificent streams in the woods, they moved into villas. They're the ones responsible for anti-Semitism. Otherwise, we lived very well. I don't know if it's wealth that brings anti-Semitism or something else.

The workers were Socialists but, in spite of that, they didn't like Jews very much. At the beginning, when socialism appeared, everyone was together. Then there was the Bund. You know what the Bund is? They were Jewish Socialists. That led to tension, separation between the socialists. It was the same idea but two organizations. Everybody was pulled to his own side. They didn't even let us demonstrate with them. There had to be a separate Jewish group, with the red flag, and the Catholics, the Catholic workers, on the other side, with the same flag and the same slogan. But it was no longer the same.

The notion of backwardness, however, is not limited to economic backwardness and poverty. It tends to include the whole of the traditional way of life, which forces Jews to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population by their language, their food, their appearance (caftan, skullcap, beard, sidecurls). Integration into modern society seemed incompatible with customs that were considered outdated. The next step was the questioning of religious practices and beliefs. The world of childhood thus appeared as a world left behind even before it was lost.

All variants and degrees are represented in this striving for modernity, from simple linguistic and sartorial acculturation to assimilation that is more or less complete. The evolution itself varies as a function of social status and geographical context. The Jewish communities of Poland and Russia, enclosed in their own particularities and composed of the lower classes, can indeed seem "backward," according to the criteria of acculturation evidenced by the French or German Jews, so proud of their integration into their respective nations.^[4]Do these repre-

[4] Cf. Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation (1770–1870) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1973); Michael R. Mar-rus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Patrick Girard, Les Juifs de France de 1789 à 1860: De l'emancipation à l'égalité [The Jews of France from 1789 to 1860: From Emancipation to Equality] (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1976).

sentations reflect a labor of memory, a retrospective judgment by people who have reinterpreted their past with the categories they assimilated after their emigration? This is only partially true, since these categories already conflicted with traditional values in the countries of origin. The memories collected reveal differences within families, cleavages between generations, even personal dramas. These differences, however, did not always take the form of sharp conflicts: some parents, influenced by their children, accepted half measures and compromises; sometimes they let themselves slip into the new habits.

Maurice N.:

My father dressed as a Hasid, with a caftan and a beard. He wore the Jewish skullcap . . .

Me, I already dressed like everybody else. But since I was at the yeshiva^[5] in Warsaw for two years, my grandfather bought me a Jewish skullcap. It was round with a little border. I wore it, but I didn't like it. I didn't like to set myself apart with sidecurls. I didn't wear it for long, only for a year, I think. Then I took it off. I didn't want it. I didn't like it.

[ . . .] My father was a total atheist. That started in Poland. But since he had a great respect for his parents (his parents had a terribly strong influence on him), he couldn't show it in Poland. He started by getting active in Zionist organizations, in Mizrahi,^[6] and then in the Communist party. He had literature hidden all over the Gemore.^[7] That's what led him to leave Poland and come here. You know, when a Hasid changes, he changes completely. It was something overwhelming, a revolution that took place, brutal, from one extreme to the other. But in spite of everything, until his death he stayed within the tradition. He often quoted what he had learned. He was really a

[5] Seminary of talmudic study.

[6] Mizrahi : religious Zionist movement founded in 1902.

[7] Or Gemara, "completion" commentary on the Mishnah, the code of the oral law (both together form the Talmud).

scholar, a learned man. There weren't many people in France who knew as much as he did about those issues.

Charles H.

My mother even had her hair cut off before her wedding. It was traumatic for both of them. It seems that my mother had beautiful hair, and my father wasn't happy that they cut it off. But they did it. And I still remember my mother with a wig (what they call the Yiddish sheitl ). It's a memory up to 1914, up to the war, because then, when my father was a soldier, my mother let her hair grow back and wore only a scarf. When my father came back home in 1918, after the collapse of Austria, cutting off her hair again was no longer an issue. So my mother got her hair back, but by then it had turned a bit white.

After the war, my father himself took off the shtraimel, the hat they wear on Saturday, a sort of velvet or silk hat, with borders of either fur or fur tails, depending on where a person is from, that go all the way around. In our village, it was fur tails, you see. Depending on how wealthy you were, it was otter or mink, a maroon-colored fur. It took the war to do away with the wig and the shtraimel!

Only on Saturday did my father go to synagogue in the garment they call in Yiddish the jebetze,^{[ 8]} which comes from the Polish word jupan —a long garment, a sort of light overcoat of silk. It's rather strange because the pious Jews of that little town weren't aware that they were dressing like the Polish nobles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My father wore it on Saturday (in summer; in the winter, of course, he wore a fur coat over it).

Georges F.:

There were some who were already starting to open their shops on Saturday. Naturally, the finger of scorn was pointed at him. And no Jew went into his shop, only the Catholics. He opened his shop; he worked on Saturday. It was an incredible development. When we passed by, my father crossed the street

[8] The jebetze and the shtraimel were Hasidic garments.

to avoid seeing it. Saturdays were really something—you couldn't even carry a handkerchief in your pocket. You had to hang it around your neck. That was observed in our house until I was twenty. But there was already a change in the village and a new spirit brought with it freedom of thought.

By now at home, my mother was also starting to understand, I don't know by what holy spirit, that it wasn't fair that there should be such poverty. Others were rich. There was no equality.

Yacob-Jacques L.:

Yes, I was dressed like my father at that time. I didn't dare do otherwise. My mother couldn't have stood it if I had dressed like the others, the goys. Oh, when I went to Warsaw, I dressed like them, with a vest and a hat, like here, yes, yes. But when I came home for the holidays, twice a year, for Passover and Sukkot, then I dressed like them, like the Jews, so as not to hurt my mother.

I had a brother in Warsaw. He had a watchmaker's shop. When I came to his house in a vest and a hat like everybody else, he said to me: "What do you know! I never would have expected it! There you are, dressed just like the goys. Who would have believed it?" When I stopped wearing a beard, my mother cried when she saw me. She cried for the beard.

You made a ghetto for yourself. For example, I have Christian friends here, and I'll tell you something, just between us, it seems to me there's a kind of wall between them and me. I'm wrong, maybe. Maybe I'm wrong. So, you see, when you came to interview me, it's not me who's doing you a favor, it's you who are doing me a favor.

Bernard P.:

I got through my bar mitzvah, but I don't think I prayed afterward. I pretended two or three times, but I never really prayed. I wasn't a believer, and that's stayed with me. I am deeply atheistic, although today I'm a little more tolerant toward religion.

At the age of fourteen, influenced by my father, I joined

Hashomer HaZa'ir.^[9] My father had been a militant Zionist ever since his religious emancipation, because he himself came from a family of orthodox Jews. There were seven brothers. Three of them abandoned traditional clothes and were emancipated in a religious sense.

Encouraged by his own aunt, Lazare M. ate non-kosher food for the first time (not without an inner revulsion). Later on, his political involvement was aided by his mother's half-resigned, half-proud attitude. His trip along the path to modernity necessitated his first departure—from Kalisz to Warsaw—in order to study at the university.

You know, in Poland, in '20, '25, that was the time when things were starting to change. There were new ideas, Zionism, communism. In the high school in our town, which wasn't a religious high school, we ate without a hat, without a skullcap. But the food they gave us was kosher all the same. It didn't exist, the question of kosher, non-kosher. If you wanted to eat non-kosher, you had to go to the goyim on Yom Kippur. With us, everything was kosher. If I wanted, I ate ham, but not at home because I had to take my mother and father into account. For that I had to go to another neighborhood because, in our neighborhood, everything was Jewish, the meat was kosher, butter and milk were kosher. Non-kosher didn't exist for Jews.

But there were people, you know, who, when they started to change, were contentious, horribly contentious. They were very provocative. On Friday night, when people were coming out of the synagogue, they would smoke cigarettes right in front of them. What's the point? Or on Yom Kippur, they'd take a piece of bread and eat. There were people like that.

In my house, we respected the holidays, we were observant. But I myself didn't fast on Yom Kippur. I went to my uncle's to eat. My uncle and aunt weren't observant. But my grandmother or my mother, if they had heard that I ate on Yom Kippur, they would have said: "It's not true."

I'm going to tell you how I ate hazer [pork ] the first time. My uncle said to me: "I'm taking the train to Cologne. You

[9] "Young Guard," a leftist, Zionist youth movement.

and your aunt are coming with me. Let's say, about twenty miles. I'm going to buy you a round-trip ticket." I was his pet. And as for me taking the train, it was the second time. That was in '22, I believe. I was twelve. We went toward the German border, toward Poznan. Down there, everything had been German for two hundred years. It was altogether different. I was fascinated. My uncle went on to Berlin and we got off, my aunt and I, in a little town called Ostow. But we had to wait a few hours before going back. We visited the town and we went to get something to eat. My aunt took me into a restaurant and ordered something with port cutlets. She knew, she said to me: "It's pork rib, you have to eat it!" I was so scared. I ate, I ate, but I said to myself: "How can you eat that?" I ate it all the same. And I assure you, for a few days, I was sick. Not physically sick. But mentally, it hurt me.

[ . . .] I was in the leftist labor Zionists. It turned out that May 1 once fell on the last day of Pesah . We had the meeting in a plaza behind the synagogue. It was city hall, let's say, that had authorized it. My mother knew I was to be the speaker on behalf of our youth movement. She wasn't happy that I was speaking, but she came to listen all the same, because it was her son who was speaking. My mother wasn't happy that I belonged to that movement but when they voted for parliament, she always voted as I told her. Because there was a Jewish vote, Jewish slates. "Mama, I voted for the leftist labor Zionists!" So she said to me: "But they're not religious!" "But, Mama, it's my party!" She always voted like her son.

[ . . .] I went to Warsaw in '31. I stayed there three years. I was a leader of the youth movement and I studied, not at the university but in what was called a seminary, a Jewish teachers college. You can't imagine how a poor student managed to get by in Poland. To earn a little bit, I worked as a teacher in a Jewish school. Not full time. I had a few hours in a school where the language of instruction was Yiddish. It was from the C.Y.S.H.O.V., "Central Organization of Jewish Schools." All the schools of that organization had a leftist orientation. In Warsaw, there were four of them of the Bund and four of the leftist labor Zionists.

Radicalism

We shall not trace here the multiplicity of political movements that stirred the Jewish world of eastern Europe between the two world wars. Let us recall, however, that with their schools, libraries, youth groups, and sport clubs they constituted vast social networks of a totally new character, compared to those of the traditional religious currents (themselves very diverse). Although these narratives of activists sometimes seem stereotyped insofar as they endeavor to justify a past and a loyalty, they nevertheless re-create all the richness and vitality of the intellectual debates among the Jews of Poland in the 1930s. In the case of Marc B., political involvement sustained his thirst for learning.

I was born to a family of Hasidim. In my early youth, I wanted very much to read. My older brothers already had newspapers and books, and I always tried to read what they brought home.

I went to school until the age of thirteen, and then I became an apprentice (leather worker). Even at that time, I had such a desire for reading that every day I bought a newspaper that I sided with. I used to buy my newspaper on the way to work. There was also a library in Warsaw, a famous one, the only lending library. It was called Bressler. I enrolled.

It was the war of '14 that forced me to interrupt my apprenticeship, and I had to go without reading because my family was poor, and I couldn't afford to continue. But after the Germans occupied Warsaw, a canteen was opened. It was the union sponsored by the Bund that opened that canteen to give poor people something to eat. At the same time, they opened a reading room. There were newspapers, magazines, books. When I found out there was a reading room, I went there right away. I stayed down there. Several groups were formed. We argued. We discussed what we had read. We talked about events. I was young (I was fifteen) at that time, but I already had a few ideas. I went there every day for newspapers and reading. I didn't go to eat—I ate at home—but I went there because of the special reading room.

They also started giving lectures. Once they invited Medem,

who was a founder of the Bund.^[10] He had been arrested in Warsaw, but they couldn't deport him to Russia. So he was freed by the Germans and he stayed in Warsaw.

At that time, the leaders saw that it was in their interest to make us join what was called Zukunft, the Jewish youth organization. Zukunft, that means the future. So I belonged to that Bundist youth organization. Every week the leaders came to teach us about sociology and economic life. It was organized in little groups, each of which had a name. I belonged to the Kautsky group.

The goal was also cultural. They started a little library. It was during the war, and they didn't have much money. But this group went to get books in private houses, from those who had them. It lasted almost two years. In 1917, instead of that canteen, they rented a big building we named Bronislaw Grosser. He was one of the leaders of the Bund; he had passed away in 1912. Later on, they founded clubs in his name in various towns of Poland.

Right away, when they saw I had a certain interest, I was one of those who helped out with running that library. It went on like that until the war. Life began again. It was all topsy-turvy. So they wanted to expand. They rented a bigger building and started buying a lot of books. At the same time, I was active not only in the youth group but also in the Bund party. I'm not saying I was a leader, just an active member of that movement in Praga. I was active in the Bund, but mainly for libraries.

Julien K. followed a more restless yet typical itinerary, going from leftist Zionism to communism, then to Trotskyism and later to Bundism. In each instance he based his choices on lucid analyses, while preserving intact the intense revolutionary faith that gave meaning to his life.

I started my political activity when I was in high school. I was always interested in the events that were taking place in the country, the world. I even remember the Pilsudski coup d'état. I was a very young boy; I was fourteen. He was supported by

[10] Vladimir Medem, (1879–1923) was a prominent leader (not founder) of the Bund in Poland and Russia.

all the leftists, including the Communist party, which was clandestine. I remember the agitation in Cracow. Later on, let's say when I was seventeen, one of my pals, a little bit older than me, introduced me to Hashomer HaZa'ir, a leftist Zionist organization, where I fit in right away. The goal was Aliyah , immigration to Eretz Israel, to Palestine. At that time, I was a high school student; they said: OK, we can accept the high school diploma but, in principle, one mustn't study, except in special cases. We're going to work as simple workers in a kibbutz. At that time, yes, I planned to go to Palestine.

In that organization, there was a very friendly atmosphere, a great camaraderie. They organized parties, evening gatherings, celebrations, games. People had friends of both sexes because there were girls too. It had a very special spirit and you took to it right away.

There was a big controversy with Mordechai Orenstein, who published a very controversial article. In his pro-Communist zeal, he went so far as to justify the persecutions of the Zionists in the Soviet Union. He said that, until 1927, the leftist labor Zionists were legal there, which was true, and that all the Zionists who had been arrested hadn't been arrested as Zionists but as anti-Soviets. He also developed the theory that in the break in the labor movement the Communists were right, that their line was revolutionary and that the line of the reformist Socialists was false. So this engendered a great controversy. I stayed in Hashomer HaZa'ir until many of my friends left it to join the Polish Young Communist Movement.

In that organization, in Cracow, at least 80 percent of the members were Jews. Aside from a few mining areas where the Polish Communist party had a certain influence, it really didn't have much of a base among the Polish population. I think that comes in part (I see it now, but I don't know if I analyzed it in this way at the time) from the war of 1920 between Poland and Soviet Russia. Russia invaded Poland. There were strong anti-Russian traditions among the Poles. They were very passionate about their independence, and they thought the Communists were acting against their nation. And the Jews, in my opinion now—because that certainly wasn't my analysis at the time—

among the Jews, there was a kind of messianism. The Jews didn't find any place for themselves in society. Jewish workers were doubly persecuted, the intellectuals didn't see any opportunities before them, there was the numerus clausus. You felt that persecution.

There were several tendencies within Jewish life. One was to emigrate, to go to a state that would be Jewish; the other was to fight where you were, to fight to make the revolution that would save the Jewish people. At one time, I was tempted by the leftist labor Zionists. But there were also the Communists. We thought that was the radical solution. At that time, Yiddish literature was flourishing in the Soviet Union. The Yiddish language was recognized as an official language; you could speak in that language in the courts in the Ukraine. So, you said to yourself, there it is—liberation comes from there. One day I decided to make the leap and I got in touch with the Communist Youths.

I went to a meeting of Hashomer and made a declaration to explain why I was leaving the organization. But my comrades in the Communist movement didn't appreciate that at all. They were for the Trojan horse tactic: you had to try to stay inside Hashomer, to work to undermine it and win people for the Communist party. You had to play a role for a certain time and follow the instructions they gave you. But having made that speech and broken it off, I couldn't follow that tactic.

[ . . .] I remember that I was already in opposition in the party. Once somebody came to our house, to my father, because he knew him. It was the famous historian Isaac Deutscher.^[11] Now he's well known. He was a few years older than me and he was already one of the members of the Trotskyite organization that had just been created in Poland. He had been the editor of a Communist newspaper in Yiddish, The Literary Tribune. He had managed to put out a Trotskyite issue with some articles on Germany, on the greatest danger threatening the working class; all democratic forces should unite in a popu-

[11] Isaac Deutscher, (1907–1967) was a Marxist historian and political scientist, born in Poland, internationally known for his works on Stalin, Trotsky, and the Soviet Union.

lar front against fascism. He was thrown out. Right then, I started reading Trotsky's pamphlets on Germany. I found very good things, especially on that issue of the Fascist danger and the popular front. He proved that the theory of social fascism was absolutely stupid: you can't call all non-Communists fascists. There are differences. Even if someone criticizes social democracy as being opportunistic, it really can't be put in the same category as fascism. For me, all those were quite convincing arguments.

At that time, a member of the Central Committee who had come to Cracow was staying in my house. A Jew, he read Yiddish. It was after the infamous March 5, 1933. Hitler had already come to power. Then, all of a sudden, there was an appeal of the Komintern to all Socialist parties to form a popular front. This guy from the Central Committee didn't know that yet but I did, because my father brought home the Moscow newspaper Emes . And that newspaper gave the text of that Komintern appeal. I was sly. I started by saying to him: "Comrade, don't you think we should appeal to all the Socialist parties in Poland to make a popular front? Maybe they won't agree, but then we'll be able to unmask their leaders." He answered me: "Why, not at all! You're really on a dangerous course. That would be to recognize them as partners, give them prestige. It's absolutely impossible. To address them means we become social Fascists ourselves. No, no way, we must never address the leaders of those parties. We want to make the popular front from the ground up."

So, without saying anything, I picked up the copy of Emes and gave it to him. He read it three times. He could read Yiddish. He read the text three times. Then he looked to make sure I didn't give him an issue that was ten years old, the date and all that. And when he saw that it was a recent issue of a Communist Soviet newspaper, that it was a genuine appeal of the Komintern—then, in a single stroke, but really without thinking, he said exactly the opposite of what he had said before: "Why, that's completely right! To unmask the social Fascists, you have to make the appeal." It really shocked me to see that mentality.

I was already under the influence of the Trotskyites when I

was arrested. I stayed in prison for a few weeks, that's why I didn't reach all the conclusions concerning what happened. But later I got in touch with the Trotskyite organization, which already existed in Warsaw. There was another small opposition group that went along with the popular front,^[12] and later we united. I was one of the founders, so to speak, of the Trotskyite organization we created in Cracow. So I broke with the official Communist party. Naturally, all those who remained Communists didn't want to talk to me anymore. I had gone over to the enemy camp.

I had become a militant Trotskyite but it was true that there were certain things I didn't understand very well in Trotskyism because I really didn't know what was going on in the Soviet Union. All those problems of the struggle against the leftists, the ultra-leftists. But I did understand the popular front very well. Once Hitler had seized power, the Communists' position became absolutely absurd. They told us that there had been no defeat of the working class in Germany. We asked: "Why?" "Because there was no struggle!" "Precisely, defeat without struggle, it's even worse!" "Of course not, Hitler overthrew social democracy. After that we're the ones who will come. There will be a Red October after Hitler." Well, history showed what reality was.

[12] The threat of fascism in France in 1934 led to the formation of a popular front between the factions on the left, which won the elections and came to power in 1936. See p. 181.

5—
Metamorphoses

If all the narrators born around the Mediterranean express a strong sense of belonging to the local community, if the local community was the center of gravity of their lives, they nevertheless also remember being at the junction of several cultures. The tale of their childhood and youth is generally the tale of a transition between an indigenous culture, natural as the mother tongue, and yet already a composite, and a culture acquired in their own environment or inculcated by school. They perceive that passage as a social climb, an escape, sometimes liberation. But, simultaneously, the impression pops up here and there of their having been a pawn in a game going on somewhere else: between the western powers, which were competing for new supporters (through the school, the press, the Church, music, etc.); between those powers and the indigenous states, which were not happy to see their subjects taken out of traditional frameworks and drawn irresistibly toward other horizons.^[1]

"At the Crossroads of Three Cultures"

Georges X., born in Tunis in 1908

Here's how it happened. Those who want exact information on the Judeo-Arab environment of Tunisia, particularly of

[1] On the period and the processes recalled in this chapter by the Jews of North Africa, see André Chouraqui, Between East and West: A History of the Jews of North Africa (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968). For Egypt, see Jacques Hassoun et al., Juifs du Nil [Jews of the Nile] (Paris: Sycamore, 1981).

Tunis, must know that, for those of my generation, there was Arab, or Judeo-Arab, culture; there was French, or Franco-Arab, culture; and there was Italian culture. Now, because of my family, I myself was at the crossroads of these three cultures because my father was from Italian culture. My paternal grandmother, who lived in our house, only spoke Italian. She spoke only Italian or Arabic. She knew French, but she refused to speak it. It was a kind of madness about Italy. So, my father and I, we spoke to her only in Italian. And my mother, who was beginning to be emancipated—this was the first generation that was emancipated—she went to the Italian school and got a degree and it was only afterward that she went to the lycée.^[2]

At home, then, until the age of ten, Italian dominated. Italian dominated even more so since my father was the correspondent of some sons of his cousins who were from Mahdia and were civil servants in Tunis. They stayed at our house on Saturdays and Sundays. And during World War I, they were Italian soldiers, with the Italian cloak. . . . Two of them died in the war, on the Italian front. They had . . . not a worship exactly but a kind of Italian impregnation that didn't go so far as worship. But, for me, it held a kind of fascination.

From a culinary point of view, for example, there was spaghetti and cheese in my house. And my father sent me to buy cheese at Cassar's foodstore. You don't know it? Cassar, they're Maltese. At the beginning of Rue de l'Église, there was a kind of courtyard and, there, there was a charming little foodstore, just like the ones you find in some parts of the Trastevere in Rome. It was exactly the same kind. And, of course, it wasn't kosher. My father wasn't religious. I used to go buy cheese there and then I'd come back to buy wine in a sort of wretched little Italian restaurant on the Rue des Maltais. My grandfather was connected to the Italian families by marriage, etc. But my father married a Tunisian, Sarfati, who was completely Tunisian. So when we went to my maternal grandfather, we changed worlds! That's true; we just had to go thirty feet and we were in another

[2] The French lycée, that is. Emancipation is the word used at the time. The mother must have been born in the 1880s.

world. At my maternal grandmother's house, we ate kamounia [cumin stew ] and we ate mloukhia [stew of Jewish mallow ]. We ate all those whatchmacallits that we didn't have in my father's house. And there was the hubbub of Tunisian families—everybody talked loud. There was this kind of hustle, and even if the houses were clean, they smelled of onions. From Thursday on, they smelled of onions.^[3]

My maternal grandfather was religious without being religious. He had already taken a tiny step toward emancipation, but he couldn't speak French. He only spoke Judeo-Arabic. He could write Judeo-Arabic. He was a grain dealer and, every night, when he came home, he did his accounts, standing up in front of a black cabinet. I can still see him. . . . Little pieces of paper, no ledgers, eh, little pieces of paper he stacked up like that. And I was always amazed at that writing I didn't know. I knew French. I had a vague notion of Hebrew letters because of the bar mitzvah; I had a vague notion of Arabic letters because of my Arab friends; but those letters—I didn't know what they were. He wrote Judeo-Arabic. The letters aren't the same as classical Hebrew. It looks a little bit like what's called Rashi's writing; it looks a little bit like that.

So he had a Judeo-Arabic culture. He didn't pray on Friday night anymore. The aunts told me he used to say kiddush [blessing on the wine ], but I never saw him do it. He did do the whole Shabbat, that is, he had the Shabbat lamps lit; it was all quite proper. He didn't go to synagogue, and he didn't do the Havdalah either. I didn't learn the Havdalah until later.

He had taken a small step toward emancipation. But he was deeply Jewish, Judeo-Arabic. Because on Rosh Hashanah [New Year ], he went to synagogue; on Kippur, he went to synagogue. Not only did he go there, but we went with him all the time. I remember perfectly hearing him chant all the prayers. It was a little synagogue next door, a family synagogue, private, which belonged to the Bessis. There were families like that [meaning stuffy ones ], who were admitted to that synagogue of the Bessis.

[3] The preparation of the Sabbath couscous began on Thursday. The two stews mentioned above also have a strong odor.

And I remember hearing him chant there every year in a very beautiful voice, a bit muffled, but very moving. That means that he had a deep Jewish culture. And for me, that was the Judeo-Arabic side.

At that time, we were introduced into French culture, step by step. We learned French, but we didn't rub elbows with them. We would go to the best one in the class to copy the Latin translation. As we came into a house, it smelled bad [with a wrinkling of his nose, he recalls the smell of cooking with butter ]. What's true is that we didn't rub elbows with them. We didn't rub elbows with them because they didn't want to, because we were Jews. Besides, we didn't really push it because we didn't have the same games or the same ways of thinking. So we forced our way into French culture. We acquired the literary and scientific culture, but it wouldn't be true to say that we were assimilated at that time. We were able to take a few steps toward assimilation only here, in Paris. I lived in Lyon for a year. It was the same thing: I never saw the inside of one of my friend's houses. That began only in Paris. My problem is very special, in fact, because I married a Frenchwoman. She was a Frenchwoman from the provinces, and there I really was admitted. That's what encouraged my emancipation. So did my political orientation, which meant that a whole bunch of people were my friends. And of course, when I entered the families, I felt almost forced to be assimilated into them. The fact is that I came out of there reassured, which didn't happen to me with the Jews.

As for that French culture, we acquired it. It came later, whereas Italian culture and Judeo-Arabic culture are native to me. That's the difference. The others are native. The population of Tunis ran the gamut: there were those who were more consistently Judeo-Arabic in character, those who were more Italian, etc., a kind of melting pot.

And that's how we lived those marvelous years, rich years. It was a great experience because there wasn't any obstacle in the midst of the culture that was ours. We assimilated other elements coming from elsewhere, but they didn't assimilate us.

Of the component of his culture designated "Judeo-Arabic," Georges X. retains more than the strong odor of onion that prevailed

in the house and the cryptic language of his grandfather's accounts. In other sequences of his biography, he also recalls two Jewish religious figures. One is negative: the ignorant rabbi who prepared him for the bar mitzvah without understanding anything of what he said or explaining anything he might have known. The other image that comes up, beaming in the twilight of a lonely room, is that of an old relative—an uncle or great grandfather? Who knows?—to whom the child brought his daily dinner, "an egg and an eighth of boukha" [ fig brandy] . Characterized by asceticism, solitude, and mystery, the man was steeped in the study of the Zohar, The Book of Splendor, and it is this memory, a luminous point of childhood, that now seems to have led his descendant back to the study of Torah.

"At the junction of three cultures," he tells us. Looking at his statement more closely, the first culture corresponds to religious practices, to a scripture and to dietary habits. The second, connected with the memory of a language, Italian, and a diet of cheese, is also evoked by the newspaper an uncle reads and comments on in the evening. This culture is already part of the process of "emancipation" described by Georges X. But Arabic culture? Though it was the culture of the majority in the country, it is absent from the picture painted for us. Very present instead through schools, newspaper stands, and bookstores was French culture, dominant though the culture of a minority. Paradoxically, the living languages spoken since childhood seem to belong to a dying culture, whereas the printed language, laboriously learned, is the one that allows the narrator to pull himself up to modernity. A junction, yes, but all of its roads are not of equal value. Some seem henceforth to be dead ends while others are avenues of escape and social mobility. André A., born in Tunis in 1926, echoes him:

The Jews had the same habits, the same customs as the Muslims, yes! It's with colonialism that they played the French card. They tried to get out of their ghetto by adopting French culture—that's what it is. Previous generations had kept Muslim habits—the superiority of the man over the woman, etc.—and there was an inevitable development, a worldwide development, toward equality. But there was also the move, in Tunisia, of the Jews toward French culture, which happened because of colonialism. We are the products of colonialism. And finally, there were some of us who considered ourselves French. Like

us: we're closer to the Martins than to the Muhammads. In Tunisia, I never read a single Muslim writer, a single Muslim poet. I read German philosophers; I read French poets . . .

Georges X. also describes this linguistic and cultural migration, which he calls "emancipation," as emigration. His early childhood was spent in a poor neighborhood outside the ghetto, but it is still presented as "a whole world," where all the components of the local society were represented: all, except one, for the narrative reveals that there was no French component. During his adolescence, the family moves—and the name of the street is indicative—to Avenue de France. This distance, less than half a mile, is remembered as a radical break. The grandfather will no longer return to Rue des Tanneurs except for Yom Kippur. For the grandmother, "there was no longer anything to look forward to, there was nothing." For the adolescent and his brothers, Avenue de France marks the coming of "culture." Later on, another move marks a new break. Georges X. leaves for France to study. He is "accepted" into French society and finally feels a sense of comfort he no longer shared with Jews.

The Rue des Tanneurs was an extraordinary street because it was an enclave. It was self-sufficient; there was no need to go outside the street for anything at all. There were butchers, vegetable merchants, doctors, restaurants, a printshop, a blacksmith, a carpenter, a baker. You just can't imagine all that was on the Rue des Tanneurs—a whole world. And that world had its peculiarities, because there was its own smell, and that is still in my nostrils.

The narrator then describes the tanners "at the end of the alleys," from which "a yellowish water flowed all day long." He discovered the innards of the earth one day when he had lost a ball, which wound up in the vat of a tannery:

I went to get the ball . . . and there I saw a sight I might describe today as infernal. Under a vaulted house, a rather low house, buried, half-buried, there was a tanner who had strung up some sort of thick leather aprons, slapping wilth a kind of wood shovel. I didn't see them. They must have been slapping on the hides . . . and I was scared. I ran away and left the ball.

But that wasn't all there was to the street—the street was where we lived. We were street children; the street belonged to us. There were grocers, who were Arabs. The baker—there was an Arab one and a Jewish one. The butchers were all kosher; people came from all over town to buy kosher meat on the Rue des Tanneurs. . . . In the alleys there lived many Italian families and many Maltese families. The Arabs were the tanners and some small tradesmen who were there. We lived in a community of Italians, Maltese, Jews, and Arabs, without any difference. The children played together without any difference. It was really a wonderful world.

Then, after the move to Avenue de France:

That was really another life. We moved on to high school. From the amusement of the street, we moved on to the amusement of the newspapers. The newspaper stands were closer. We threw ourselves into reading, culture. We went, my brother and I, to subscribe to the reading libraries. We had a completely different orientation. My grandfather didn't see anybody from Rue des Tanneurs anymore except on Kippur, when we went to the synagogue. . . . And that is where we lived until I left for school. And when I came back for vacations, my grandfather was dead and my mother had gone to live—taking her mother and one of her sisters, the youngest—on Avenue de Paris . . .

Ambivalent images combine here: the lost world was an infernal, archaic, visceral world, a world of dark alleys, dirty water, meats, entrails, and hides. But it was "whole," central (people came from all over the city to buy meat; the narrator also says that his street was "the industrial center" of the city). It formed a self-sufficient microcosm, rich in immediate and intense human relations: "The street belonged to us." By contrast, entrance through the front door—Avenue de Paris, the French lycée—to French culture leads to both emancipation and alienation: in France "I felt almost forced to be assimilated to them."

For Laure A., who was born and grew up in Istanbul at the beginning of the century, French culture was not only the culture of school and emancipation but also the culture of distinction, which placed people

higher up on the social ladder. The westernization of the family had begun in the generation of her father, who was born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century:

At the age of twelve, my father spoke French as well as I do. At twelve, he wrote without any mistakes. He had learned French in a Jewish French school. Papa stayed at school until twelve or thirteen. Then his father died, and he had his four brothers to feed. He was the oldest; then there was Uncle Moses, Uncle Solomon, Uncle Raphael. . . . My father was the shrewdest, the most intelligent. He was called Jacques. The other one, Uncle Moses, he was a real Englishman, with a pipe, music. . . . The uncle from Berlin, Raphael, always had a monocle and a cane . . .

Characteristically, Laure A. gives her uncles' first names in the Hebrew version, but she frenchifies her father's name, which was Isaac. This game continues in the following sequence where, telling of the schooling of the girls of her generation, she persists in calling the schools of the Alliance Israélite the "Alliance Française," a name that serves here as a cachet of social distinction:

In my generation, there were schools in Turkey that weren't good; they had people who weren't from our social circle. . . . So my two oldest sisters went to convent schools—Christian, Catholic. Since there were a lot of us, Mama put them in boarding school. She was very happy with the education, with everything. Then a Jewish student there converted. That was a disaster for all the Jews—not only converted, but they made her a nun. She became Sister Something-or-Other. That she converted, that was nothing, but she became a nun. . . . Angela, I think. The Jewish community didn't accept that.

My two sisters M. and R. were in the French Jewish school. Teachers from the Alliance Francaise of Paris. They were Jews, but they had gone to school in Paris.

"So it was the Alliance Israélite?"

Yes, the Alliance Israélite Française, I think, in French. The Alliance Française Israélite ! But later, that school was closed. The schools, they had children of butchers, of peasants. . . . You're

going to tell me . . . Here . . . here, it's not like that. Milkmen are very respected. There, they were poor people—the baker, the one who sold meat, fish, all that—they were poor people. So to be in the same schools with them was to lower yourself a bit.

The three sisters then went to the German school, then the American College, and they spoke fluent Spanish, German, French, and English but not a word of Turkish.

"The Extra Muros"

Launched into European culture, its languages, its music, its styles, one had already gone without even leaving the ground on which he or she grew up. In Tripoli at the beginning of the century the school apparatus being yet embryonic, there were other strategies of social distinction than those recalled by Laure A. (Rather than going to school you had the headmistress come to your house for private lessons.) But just as inevitably, you became a foreigner—significantly, Camilla N. describes her family's move from the center of the city to an "extra muros" neighborhood—and you were transported to other shores: Constantinople, where Camilla N.'s father went several times? No, that is a dream long cherished but never realized. The father also had regular commercial relations with Fezzan and distant Africa. His daughter was fascinated by that. I ask her if she went there: "Are you kidding? Never, it was too far!" Instead the family went on vacation each summer, sometimes in Tunisia, sometimes in Italy. And once she got married, Camilla N. finally moved to Paris.

We spoke almost all languages, you know. That is, we spoke Arabic, but our friends were Syrians. There were state officials, functionaries of Turkey. They came from Syria, from Lebanon; they spoke Arabic, they spoke Turkish. Papa spoke Turkish very well, he was very assimilated with them. And those people were so nice! Such refined cooking! We had Turkish dishes that were really something!

And one of the things we had—this is to tell you about the mixture of our lives—was something extraordinary: we had,

like many children, if you like, a kind of governess, a Jewish woman from Smyrna who spoke Spanish.

"So you also learned Spanish?"

A little. Greek, for example, we had Greek friends who came to school with us because there were things [fisheries ] of sponges there, you know? It was small, small. I admit it was very small, but there were Greeks, there were Turks, there were English, the consuls, that is. So all those people saw each other regularly in the places called extra muros because they were outside the city.

You know, we spent much more time with foreigners. We were raised with foreigners, our family especially, because we were outside. The family, the cousins, had already gone to Europe. So they were very Europeanized already too.

There, I'm going to tell you, for example. There weren't so many teachers and schools and everything. My English teacher was the . . . priest of the Protestants, as it's called, he was the one who was Protestant. So I knew the whole Jewish religion explained in English because he taught me about religion. My Italian teacher was a defrocked priest. Naturally, there was a rabbi in the house every day who came for the boys. We had teachers for everything.

"You had private teachers?"

There wasn't anything!

"There was an Alliance school, wasn't there?"

Oh, yes, my French teacher was the headmistress of the Alliance school. But she came to the house only for us. There were the nuns; I spent a year at the convent school.

In Cairo, at the beginning of the century, Jews were also at the junction of three cultures but were attracted more by the French school—in either its secular or its religious, Christian or Jewish forms. People were proud of mastering so many languages, of bending to French school discipline, of having had to learn Arabic as a foreign language. At the end of the metamorphosis, Edmond H. means "the Jews" when he speaks of "Europeans." He is already posing as a Frenchman in his recollection of how the Egyptian elite was kept in a state of humiliation by British colonial politics. Native Copts and Muslims attended the

same schools without being excluded from the Egyptian framework. For the Jews, however, frenchification by the school contributed to their marginalization.

Edmond H., Cairo, 1909:

It wasn't an Egyptian country; it wasn't the Egypt of the Egyptians. It was a cosmopolitan country. And that was our misfortune. Because if we had agreed to associate the Egyptian elite in what we were doing, we would never have had the troubles we had. Just like the French in Algeria. It was the century of British domination. So for all the formal papers, it was Arabic and English; for all the informal papers, it was French. In any store, big or small, you spoke French, and they'd answer you in French. Why? Because there weren't any Muslims behind the counter. They were mostly Jews, Greeks, Italians, Lebanese.

"What about the Copts?"

That's another category altogether. We'll talk about the Copts later. [In fact, he never talked about the Copts later. Edmond H. goes on. ] In Cairo, any Jew who didn't speak three or four languages was an imbecile, pure and simple. You're going to ask me: "How can it be that he speaks three or four languages? He can speak four languages, without reading them, without writing them. Why?—Because he hangs out with, is mixed up with, all the others."

"So what was the most widespread of these three or four languages?"

French.

"Really? Not Arabic?"

No, Arabic was for the Arabs; not for us. My daughter finished her studies at the French lycée. She took her final exams: English, first part, Hebrew, second part. She never studied Arabic. My sister, who was in the American Mission, always had perfect English, perfect French. She couldn't read even one word of Arabic.

As in Tunis with Georges X., the indigenous language Edmond H. defines as "predominant" was really the language of servants and

clients. How one used languages was one of the indicators of one's position in the social hierarchy.

French Theater

After the school, along with the school, the bookstore, the theater, and the opera were other dazzling places in which one could enjoy the fascination of French culture.

Tunis. Élie B., born in 1898. As a child, he received two francs a week from his father.

I waited impatiently for Monday to go to the bookstore to buy a work for 1.25 francs. I spent eight pence on the movies on Thursday, with one penny at intermission for kakis [salted crackers sold by peddlers ].

But it was during his first trip to France in 1920 that he discovered the world of books and ideas, the variety of the daily press and literary reviews, scholarly societies, and even some famous writers. His trip turned into a literary journey, an initiation into high culture, the measure of his divorce from the culture of his parents. While they visited the popular Parisian sights and stayed within Tunisian émigré circles, he crisscrossed Paris in the footsteps of his intellectual heroes.

[In Marseille ], I was flabbergasted. I saw the open-air theater created by the Comédie-Française. That's where I bought my first books by André Gide, the books put out by the Mercure de France. . . . Then we went up to Lyon. In Lyon, I simply visited the Saint-Jean quarter. I visited Fourvière. I visited the old streets of the Saint-Jean quarter, and there too I discovered a secondhand bookdealer who sold cheap limited editions of great authors and authors I had heard of. . . . And then we went on to Vichy. Vichy was amusing because, I remember, I went to the Casino every afternoon to hear classical operetta. I visited the environs of the city, the Petit Palais. I went rowing along the Allier, and then I visited the women. . . . Then, we got to Paris. In Paris, we lived in Montholon Square. My father went to find the Tunisians who were living there.

"They were already in that neighborhood?"

When we left Tunis, we already had a plan. People said to us: "You're going to Paris, go see this one, go see X., go see Z." You knew that some guy was in some café. My parents went to the Folies Bergère, to the Concert Maillot. . . . I found out that there was a bus not far away that took me to Place Saint Michel. I went to the Place de l'Odéon. I went to theater shows at the Odéon. I went to see the publisher Figuière, who was publishing Brulat at that time. And I remember one day when I got my ticket to the Comédie-Française. It was September 18, I remember. The Myth of Sisyphus . . . . It was magnificent, that tragedy . . .

I remember my feelings in Paris when I passed Salle Marivaux. I often saw the great stage actor Gabriel Signoret go by. And I remember that, in Vichy, I went to the theater one day to see Ibsen's A Doll's House with Luc Népo[?] and his wife Suzanne Després. It was gripping. And in the orchestra seat next to me sat the great actor of the Théâtre Français, Léon Bérard. I looked at him with admiration, and he made a friendly little gesture to me, sensing that I was looking at him. I then asked to speak to him. I had seen him in so many films . . .

Another thing about Vichy was walking around the great avenues every afternoon, with the newspaper vendors who sold all the daily papers. At that time, there was a large daily called Le Journal du peuple [The People's Newspaper ], edited by Henri Fabre, when Henri Fabre was at the height of his glory. There was also a weekly called Les Hommes du jour [Men of the Day ], and all the leftist types contributed to it.

Back in Paris, I attended a conference of the Sociétés Savantes [a cultural organization ]. I visited the Louvre. My parents had their pleasures, I had mine. They went to Chantilly two or three times to see the races because somebody had told them that that was a must. They went to the Folies Bergère and the Casino de Paris, but they didn't go to the theater even once. I saw publishers, bookstores. That year, at Figuière's, I met Count X., who was Huysmans's secretary. He took me to him and then introduced me to other writers. We'd meet in the Luxembourg; he lived on Rue Servandoni. One day, he said to me: "I'm going to take you to the teacher of us all," and he took me to Anatole

France. I made that little visit to the Villa Said . . . and when he asked me what I planned to do, I said: "My dear master, I'm thinking of devoting myself . . . I have parents who are well off . . . I'm thinking of devoting myself to literary pursuits." He smiled and said: "It's hard, you know."

Later on, Élie B. launched a little literary review in Tunisia, published his own poems, and opened an art gallery, all the while managing a pharmaceutical business. The review was titled Oasis: "An Oasis is a place of concentration . . . a place of refuge [he hesitates, I am surprised, I think "ghetto"; then he goes on, more firmly], of encounters. . . . For us, it's a place of encounters."

For Madame K., born in Tunis after 1900, Western culture also meant the stage.

Music? Every night, my mother sat down at the piano and sang: La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Lakmé . . . . She played, and we put on our nightgowns. We went to see her, and then we scurried off to bed. And when we started learning the piano at the age of six, one day, my sister and I, we were stuck, we called Mama. "Mama, what's written there?" "I don't know." "What do you mean, you don't know?" "I don't know music, I don't know notes." She played by ear; she played very well. And Fernand, her brother, how he played the prologue of Paillasse and "The old man cursed me" from Rigoletto ! You remember?

"But how did you learn music?"

Well, see. It was a culture of opera. My father had a very good position, he was rich. OK. My mother had her box at the municipal theater. She went to the evening performance on Tuesdays and Saturdays. We had three seats reserved for the Sunday matinee all year. We went with our maid. She was dressed up, wore a hat and a suit. She sat with us. On Sunday mornings, it was a ritual: my mother called us, my father got up, we sat at the foot of the bed. She'd tell us the story, sing passages to us, and when we went to the opera, we already knew what it was about. You don't have an inborn knowledge of music! And then, there was, I think, something in the family. We lived for music.

One more thing: My father couldn't study a lot because his father, as soon as he was grown up, said: "I'm not working anymore, you'll have to go to work." He took charge of his whole family. But when I started reading, I found in my father's room all of Racine, all of Molière, and all of Corneille in Old French, and all of Victor Hugo, the complete works of Victor Hugo. I remember, I was small, and I couldn't bear books in Old French! I was incapable of transposing, so I said "I wos." I remember Racine's Les Plaideurs —what I had to endure to read them.

I'll tell you something else. My mother always said that my Aunt Léa was very beautiful, a real beauty. She was sixteen years old when she got married. They called her the Rose of Tunis. She was extraordinarily beautiful. And she had been asked for by D. One of the rich D.'s. And my grandfather didn't want him because he wasn't educated enough. He preferred S.B. because he was educated! And because he was French! Because my Grandfather K. loved the French, while the D.'s were Tunisian and not educated at all. . . . My father wasn't handsome; he was dark. But he was French, and he was educated.

To be French was indeed the goal of that effort on the part of the Jewish bourgeoisie to adopt the ways of living, the provincial culture, that Tunis offered during the colonial period. You could be dark and even ugly, but education and French nationality gave you a mark of distinction. Nothing else, for in the gallery of characters presented by that woman, no "Frenchman from France," as they were then called, appears. You could read about France, hear about it, see it in the windows of the bookshops and on the school benches, but you hardly knew any Frenchmen. You were not close to any. Rather, to display a French personality was to distance yourself from the native culture, which was debased by the colonial situation. The same narrator adds:

My parents spoke only French at home. Even I have a lot of trouble speaking [Arabic ]. When I got married, I was in Sousse, I had an Italian woman for some time. And when she left, I was forced to take an Arab maid. And that was quite a scene, we were like deaf-mutes, everything like that [she gestures, mimes dialogue ]. I had to ask my sister-in-law.

Not all the Jews had access to the French school and some only passed through it. But, sooner or later, they were exposed to western culture styles and seized by them. Even Tita, who remained illiterate and Arabic-speaking, was glad when her husband adopted European dress. At the very least, others changed their names, and that already indicated a change in social station.

Tunis. In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, Sarfati, a tailor in the souk, then a grain dealer, had six children, six daughters: Marie, Mathilde, Emma, Henriette, Georgette, and Olga. All the first names are western and were fashionable at their time. However, behind the facade, another first name was hidden, the one that assured continuity with one's ancestors. For children received the names of their deceased forebears, those of the paternal line having priority over those of the maternal line. So, Marie was Meïma, a diminutive of Miriam; Mathilde was 'Atu or Mes'uda; Emma was Meïha, named after her great-grandmother; Henriette was Shmana.

Meïha, 'Atu, Shmana—the etymology of these names is no longer known. You know only that someone in the family had already had them. When the stock of ancestors of the last two generations was exhausted, family memory reached its end, and the last born had only a western name: Georgette, born in 1899, the first to have a civil registration, had no other name; nor did Olga, born in 1900.

Naming the elders was the major concern; it took precedence over assigning a Jewish identity to the children when they were born. If all the Arab first names given in this family were used exclusively by Jews, only that of the oldest, Miriam, is from a biblical source. In the case of sons, the Hebraic tradition was stronger and combined with family continuity. Names from the Old Testament were then handed down from generation to generation. But sooner or later, westernization took hold, and the old names became middle names or were "translated" into a western language. A system of equivalents was set up in which Abraham became Albert, Haim was called Victor—for Haim is "life"^[4]and there is the sound of vie in Victor—Makhlouf gave way to René, Judith slid into Edith. So everyone grew up with two, sometimes three, identities. One was for public and administrative purposes: in school, in various dealings with the bureaucracy, one used the western name.

[4] Translator's note: In French, "life" is vie .

The traditional name, pronounced in the local language, was reserved for religious rituals, from circumcision to death. More private and for the early years of life, a nickname was used by parents, schoolmates, and relatives—Mimil, Dédé, Nani, Lulu. That diminutive concealed both the Hebrew name, which classified the individual as old-fashioned, backward, "Arabized" (m'arbi), and the western name, which thrust the individual into the "developed" world but which was somewhat embarrassing to use within the family and community group. The politics of the name follows and illustrates the westernization and secularization of the Jews from Salonika to Istanbul or Casablanca. Everywhere, a kind of Marrano-like^{[ 5]}mechanism operated to conceal the Jewish identity, to confine it to domestic and ritual use. One sported a western name for public use.

Esther E. H., born in 1918 in Mogador, explains how her children's names were chosen: she was influenced by tradition as well as by recent history, that of the west, with the aspirations and illusions it aroused in Morocco.

[The first is ] René, because my father-in-law's name was Makhlouf. René, that means Makhlouf, it's the same thing. If you translate, it's René. All Makhloufs are called René. That was my father-in-law who died. Because we can't give the name of relatives when they're alive. That is, the person is afraid he'll die; it's a superstition.

Yvette, she's called Zaïta, joy. Yvette, I called her, after a friend from high school whom I loved very much. We gave them two names but we always called them by the French one. [Note that Yvette is the only French name; those that follow are Anglo-American. ]

Jimmy, his name is Haim: it's my grandfather, my mother's father; and Jimmy, because of the American landing. And we had a fellow, his name was Jimmy, he always came to our house. Robert, his name is Raphael. I gave him a rabbi's name. I said, if it's a boy, I'll name him Raphael. I don't know if I dreamed it or something like that. He's a great rabbi of Salé.

Lydia is named after Mama, Hanna. Mama, it was all the

[5] Marranos: Jews who were forced to convert in Spain and Portugal were ostensibly Christian while maintaining secretly their Jewish faith.

same to her, when she was alive, she said, "It's Papa who was superstitious; he was afraid to die." Mama died at the age of eighty-five and my father died when he was sixty-four. So, you see, that's not what killed him. And Vicky, Victoria: "We're going to name her after Queen Victoria." It's whims. They came and you gave them names.

Laure A., Istanbul, about 1910:

My brother's name was Albert. Abraham, Albert. My brother was so simple! . . . I thought that Albert was common, so I called him Bert. It was funny, it was chic, it was English. He said to me: "If you call me that name again, I'm going to tell everybody that my name is Abraham. That'll teach you to call me Bert." He was capable of playing a trick like that on me!

Poor, less westernized Jews succumbed to the same attraction and followed the same politics of names. Yvonne A., the tenth child of a family in modest circumstances, born in Algeria in 1909: "My name is Ymouna, that means trust. It's a Hebrew name. But they called me Yvonne. It's more civilized."

A Game of Chance:
The Identity Card

In periods of stability, Jews did not ask themselves questions about their religious and political identity. They belonged to a family, a social milieu, a community, and did not look beyond that horizon. They lived an apolitical existence and were content to be citizens of their own microcommunity without bothering about national denominations. The "papers" that signified an attachment to some consulate of a European country were negotiated according to the interests of the moment and were subject to the policies and rivalries of the various powers. An individual who by chance, purchase, or favor obtained a European "nationality" did not really identify with that adopted nation. European nationality was considered an insurance policy rather than a testimony of identity.

When a political change occurred—legislative reform, a crisis in international relations, war—the question was then posed brutally and

sometimes cruelly: Where to register? Where to find the protection of rights and agents who would defend "their" nationals?

This is the story of Edmond H. His ancestors, Ottoman subjects in Syria, had become French-protected Tunisians without ever seeing either Tunisia or France. In Egypt, Edmond H. lost that status without acquiring a nationality to replace it. He remained in that undefined—yet not uncomfortable—situation for a long time. It is in 1956, when he had to leave Egypt abruptly, that it became urgent to have an administrative identity.

M.S. had bought his nationality. Not his children, who were born in England. They became "British by birth." I'm going to tell you how he had obtained it. At the beginning of the century, the Ottoman Empire encompassed the entire Orient. In Egypt, the Jews didn't do military service. There wasn't any compulsory military service. There wasn't an army. On the other hand, in Syria, in Mesopotamia, in Lebanon, and in Arabia, the Turks had instituted compulsory military service. Now, military service with the Turks was very very hard, and the Jews tried to get out of it through any means. That's one of the reasons why the Jews of Aleppo, Damascus, and the Syrian towns escaped and came to Egypt, which, as I told you, became a land of milk and honey as soon as the Suez Canal opened. Some people left for Greece; others went to Europe; and the majority came to Egypt. That's why there were a lot of Syrian Jews in Egypt. Aside from that, they wanted to stay. They had their businesses; they had their houses. But they didn't want to stay as Ottoman subjects, so they asked the consults to protect them.

Each one of the protected was granted the nationality of the country he or she appealed to without too many difficulties. Once it was given, the consuls of those countries saw that there were resources to draw on. Every time somebody came to ask them [for nationality ]: "How much can you pay? You'll pay so much, they'll give you citizenship." And they found him some relationship with an Englishman, an Italian, a Frenchman. And, since the port of Livorno had burned down at that time, the questura —that is, the city hall of Livorno—had also burned

down. So anybody at all could say "my parents or my grandparents were in the Italian papers." So the consuls used that over 150 percent, and distributed citizenship. In Egypt, the consuls told themselves: "Not only can you do something but you can make yourself some money." So, instead of addressing only the poor people, saying to them "Here's nationality," they addressed the rich Jews, saying: "There are mixed courts. If you have a bad deal, they will judge you in Arab courts." Now there weren't any Arab courts, that was a make-believe court. There were mixed courts, however. And if a native had a case with a European, he went to the mixed courts. It was not open to discussion.

So, those who profited most were the Italians because they could give Italian nationality after Livorno. Then came the French. They could also say: "They are Jews from Spain, who went down to the Basque country, to Toulouse, Bayonne, Bordeaux, etc., or to Algeria or Morocco or Tunis." That's how my grandfather, who was in Syria, was able to get Tunisian protection.^[6]

"Tunisian?"

Tunis was a French protectorate. He preferred that because there was no military service. And we remained protected Tunisians ever since the beginning of the century. We had number 909 from the consulate. I still have the papers.

So how did we lose that citizenship? We lost it because, in 1940, Egyptian companies started rising. Now, the constitution of an Egyptian company provides for seven members of the council of administration. And it was stipulated that the seven members had to be Egyptians; they couldn't be foreigners. OK. I had an uncle who worked with my father.

Now, my uncle was a great poker player. One of his friends was Dr. Maher Pacha, who became chairman of the Council. He was assassinated in 1946. They played together at the Club. So he said to him: "Listen, my children need Egyptian citizenship." "What citizenship do you have?" "Nothing, French citizenship." Because they had a valid French passport, like all other

[6] By then Tunisia was a French colony.

passports. Only, on the inside, it was written: "Tunisian French protégé." He said: "Go to the consulate, give up your French citizenship, and give me your paper of withdrawal. In two days, I'll give you citizenship."

He did indeed go there, he gave up his nationality, and they gave him the paper of withdrawal. In charge of this withdrawal, there was a secretary at the consulate called the Chancellor of the Consulate. This was one Monsieur A., a Lebanese: a Lebanese who was a 101 percent anti-Semite, not 100 percent, 101 percent. So he was fuming: "You want to withdraw? With pleasure, my boy, only we're going to convene the consular tribunal." [The tribunal said ]: "Yes, we accept, but on condition that from Haim Michel H. on (my grandfather's name was Haim Michel), the whole H. mishpahah^[7] gives up its French citizenship. A single individual cannot give it up. All or nothing." My uncle didn't give a damn. He said, all agreed. The decision was made: all the descendants of Haim Michel H. disappeared from the lists of the consulate. But he didn't mean us: we weren't the sons of the H. who withdrew. But the chancellor didn't give a damn. He mixed things up.

So, they got Egyptian citizenship and founded the Egyptian company. And we were stateless. Before 1956, you had to request Egyptian citizenship every five years. You paid for the right to request, and they still didn't grant us citizenship. They told us: "It's like this, it's the law. You have to make the request and we don't grant it to you because your name isn't Ahmed or Muhammad." "But we were born in Egypt." "Yes, but that doesn't mean anything. It's the law." In reality, you didn't need citizenship. Nobody cared about it. We never thought of leaving Egypt. What did it matter? You were there, so you didn't need papers.

Now we are in Tripoli. Camilla N., born Dutch in Libya, became Italian and then French. She also described these changes of nationality in which European powers played against weak states and to which the Jews adjusted more or less comfortably.

[7] Hebrew word meaning family, which Edmond H. puts in the mouth of the Lebanese chancellor of the French consulate.

My father's ancestors had left Pisa at a time when there was a Pope who was very bad to the Jews. And they went to Tripoli. When they came, those unfortunates, to Tripoli, there were three or four families who didn't have a consul, who didn't have anybody. Since Italy was divided, there was no Italian consul. Italy wasn't yet formed. So Holland took those Jews under its protection and gave them Dutch passports. We stayed under that Dutch protection until the Turks woke up. Why? Because Italy had sent teachers, schools . . . not many schools, but elementary school anyway. She put out propaganda, and that caught on a lot with the young people. My brothers were absolutely . . . [with a gesture, she suggests "inflamed" ]. They knew they were of Italian origin. And then Holland said: "Now that's enough, there is a time when everything has to be settled." So there was a very heated debate. My father had gone to Constantinople more than once, since the Turks had been really wonderful to him and he had friends there, he didn't want to do that. It bothered him a lot to make a choice. The Turks didn't give permission: "No, you've been here for I don't know how many generations, you'll remain Turks." Anyway, there was such a fuss that finally we were made Italians by royal decree. And that's how we came to be Italians.

Nationality:
Salonikan

A namesake of the previous narrator, Papou N., born in 1894, recalls the status of extraterritoriality from which the Jews of Salonika benefited at the turn of the century. He incorrectly attributes it to the intervention of Russia.

In 1878, the Russians forced the Turkish government to give up personal control over all the non-Muslim inhabitants of European Turkey. So someone who was, let's say, Orthodox belonged to the Orthodox patriarch; someone who was an Israelite belonged to the Israelite community; and, of course, someone who was French, English, Italian, German, or American belonged to his own consulates. . . . And for those of us

who weren't Muslims, it was a dream. There was no tax. There was no military service. We weren't subject to Turkish laws. Someone who did something in the street would say to the policeman: "I'm not a Muslim." "So, what are you?" It depended on your community. OK, that's just to tell you how we lived without trouble.

But the vagaries of history put the Jews in prickly situations, which the hero enjoyed telling about and from which he always managed to escape unharmed. The Italian-Turkish war of 1912 forced the N.s and some other Jewish families to leave Salonika, some going to Brussels, others to Vienna, where our hero worked for six months. Then came the end of the war.

Meanwhile, the Turkish-Italian war is over, and we all went back to Salonika together. It was really a celebration because my brothers and sisters-in-law from Brussels came, and we all sailed from Trieste on a ship bound for Salonika. The trip lasted a week. It was really a celebration; my father was in seventh heaven. Besides, we weren't the only ones. There were at least three, four other Salonikan families in our situation, Italians like us, Modiano, all that, with their children. So, on board, it was one big party, so to speak. Everybody was happy and everything. And we get to Salonika—what misery!—just when the Greeks entered Salonika. They had finished one war, and already there's another Balkan war starting. So that was a disaster! But anyway, time passed, and afterward, everything returned to normal. This brings us to the end of 1912.

Our hero's tribulations started again with World War I and Italy's entry into the war, since the N. family is still "Italian."

Italy had entered the war with France and England against Germany. OK. She had appealed to all Italians who lived anywhere in the world to come join their homeland for military service, to enlist in the army. In Salonika, there were about thirty or forty Italians of military age. We said to ourselves: My word, this doesn't concern us. We never really knew Italy,

so why go do military service? We're in Salonika, which was Turkish before and is now Greek. We'll wait. We waited.

But mobilization did indeed take place. Our hero and his brother were sent to France. This involved not just the two soldiers, tossed from camp to camp. Rather, it is the whole family that is mobilized to get them out of it: the mother and the aunt, who rush to Marseille, the father and a cousin to Paris, the brother to Salonika. A dialogue in Paris ensued between a politician and the father ("he was decorated with the Order of His Majesty King Leopold, he wore his medal proudly and his calling card was 'Dragoman of the Consulate of Belgium in Salonika'"):

"What is this story? I don't understand. Let's get to the point in a few words. You were born what?"

"Good, in Salonika, Turkey."

"So you're Turkish." (Then he addresses M. Longuet, the deputy: "They're Turkish, OK, what else?")

"Then, at the time of the proclamation of the capitulation in Turkey, we chose to be Italian protégés."

"Oh, yes, indeed, I know that. That does complicate matters. And now?"

"Now, it's Greek."

"But, you're not Greek?"

"Oh, no."

"And you're not Turks?"

"Of course not."

"And you're not Italians?"

"No, since . . ."

"Oh," he says, "what a story!" He addresses the deputy: "Monsieur Longuet, I am sorry, I don't understand. It's so mixed up, this Macedonian salad. I don't understand. In any case, there's nothing against them, is there? Good, since there's nothing against them, for us French, I'm giving the order in Marseille to set them free, to let them out of camp to do what they want."

In Marseille, at the prefecture, and after numerous tribulations, the whole family receives new papers and a tailor-made definition:

"As nationality, I put down 'Salonikan' for you."

"Fine, that's very good, Salonikan."

"You're satisfied?"

"Yes, Salonikan, that's very good."

Some summon up Pisan ancestors, others Livornese tombstones. M.S. (Salonika, born before 1900) claims to be from Spain and gets himself out of trouble twice: first, he avoids military service in Greece and then extermination by the Germans in France.

When the Russo-Turkish war broke out, we were old enough to do military service. So my family sent us to study at the university in France. We came to France, with my brother, and we reported to the prefecture. At the prefecture, they told us that we had to be in good standing at the consulate. At the consulate of Spain: "What? Foreigners, born in Turkey, you're Spaniards? How can that be?" They didn't understand anything at all; they didn't know history. . . . We went to see the ambassador, who told us that he had to consult with Madrid: "Excellency, we have to register at school, we need registration!" "I can't do anything. All I can do is to put an ambassador's seal on top." We went with our passports: "We're recognized by the ambassador." And the ambassador wrote to Spain and they confirmed that we belonged to the three hundred sixteen families who never lost Spanish nationality. You know about that? I'll tell you:

As Spanish Jews of Salonika, we needed Spain two or three times. The first time was when the Greeks occupied Salonika. We were under the Turks, under the regime that surrendered. The Greeks entered Salonika and said to us: "For us, there aren't any Spaniards. There aren't any foreigners. Either you're Turkish or you're Greek." "No, we're foreigners, we're Spaniards." So, we appealed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid, which filed a suit against Greece. That trial took place at the International Court in the Hague in 1916. They recognized a certain number of families—three hundred sixteen families—who had always been Spaniards. They added two.

When the Germans came here, we said: "We're Spanish, not Greeks, not Turks, who are the enemy, and we're not French

either." We went to see the consul of Spain, who was a friend of my family, and I laid out the problem for him. He told me: "There's only one thing to do: go to Spain and explain your case." And he sent our request to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs while we went there.

During the war, people couldn't travel. But we were Spaniards. The Germans gave us safe-conduct passes, and I'll tell you something extraordinary: we went to Spain four times and came back. We crossed the border as Spaniards almost twice a month. It's unbelievable! Now, in thinking about it, we have to say we were unaware. Con esta gente no se sabra nunca!^[8]

That identity document, meaningless in peacetime, was the last card you had to play in a crisis: sometimes it failed to save the game.

Three sisters were born in Istanbul. One, Claire C., married in France, was Spanish by marriage, and escaped Nazi persecution by leaving Paris. The second, who became French, also fled to the south. The third, Régine, of Turkish nationality, was deported to a concentration camp with her family. Claire tells:

My sister was in Bordeaux with her husband, because he was working there. They were with a very nice French family. So, some people said: "You know, there are Jews over there." The Gestapo came. My brother-in-law said: "But we're Turks!" But he had given his card to be renewed in Paris. They sent him to Drancy, and from Drancy.^[9]  . . . And it was absurd because my sister had written to me: "I'm afraid for you because you're French. . . . We're not afraid of anything because we're Turkish." And she's the one who was deported. Bad luck. She spoke Turkish. My brother-in-law spoke Turkish like a real Turk. That was very rare among the Jews.

Régine and her family did not return from the death camp. For years, her sisters hid the truth from the mother, making her think that Régine had immigrated to the United States.

[8] With those people, you couldn't know!

[9] Town near Paris where the French police rounded up the Jews in a camp before they were deported.

For a very long time, I was the one who wrote the letters. I said that they came from America. I said: "It's Régine who's writing." Then, with time, my mother also started getting old, it was already blurry. Toward the end, we talked as little as possible. She didn't talk any more either.

6—
Wanderings

Poverty and Anti-Semitism are the most obvious and most often cited causes for leaving. However, the emphasis shifts according to circumstances and the generations of the emigrants. Those who left the Russian empire at the beginning of the century were marked by the memory of the pogroms (including the sadly famous one of Kishinev, in 1903), along with the revolutionary troubles of 1905 or the effects of the war against Japan. Nathan K., for example, drafted into the Tsarist army and about to be sent to the eastern front, preferred to desert: "I didn't have anything against the Japanese!" Right after the outbreak of World War I, the renewed outbreak of anti-Semitism produced a new wave of migrations. These included numerous students who were prevented from studying certain disciplines (particularly medicine) by the numerus clausus. Finally, in the 1930s, the economic crisis and wretched living conditions returned to the fore.^{[ 1]}

Departures

Emigration follows a classic scenario. In most cases, a close relative, an uncle or a cousin, has already gone. Sometimes his traces are lost, and there is no more news. But most often, family networks are established. The first emigrants give information and advice. They invite the others to follow their example. Another member of the family then leaves, settles in the new milieu, and is joined by his wife and children. He sends money to his parents in hopes that they will come with his

[1] Cf. Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris: Jewish Immigrant Workers in the Belle Epoque (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986).

brothers and sisters. Then the formula is repeated. Almost always, part of the family remains in Poland. And the litany recurs—they never again saw their relatives, left behind, caught in the trap, victims of genocide. The grief is mixed with a sense of guilt because they couldn't help them in time.

Robert S.:

It's especially Jewish education that cements solidarity in the community and love in the family unit: the father for the children, the mother for the children, the children for the parents, all willing to sacrifice for each other.

Being a student in France—how should I call it, a premonition?—first, I sent for my sister, the youngest, to get her out of Poland. I didn't want to go back there. I was afraid of returning to Poland. I wanted to bring my whole family. Since I couldn't do that, bring them all together, with the means at my disposal, I proceeded in stages. So in '35, I sent for my sister. And in '37, I sent for my brother. I arranged for him to work in the student union in Nancy. He waited on students in the canteen in exchange for his meals. That's how I got them out . . . because if not, they would certainly have disappeared like my parents. Afterward, in '38, I saw nazism: it was the Anschluss with Austria, the Sudetenland, and they were talking about Poland. I wanted to get my parents out and also my older sister, who had stayed with them. When I proposed that to them, my sister answered in a letter that my parents were afraid of coming to France because, at their age, they were afraid they wouldn't be able to get used to French life, not knowing a word. . . . As for her, she didn't want to leave my parents alone. So much so that when the Germans invaded Poland and started deporting the Jews—at a certain time, my sister was staying with a priest who had become friendly with her and who wanted to hide her to allow her to escape—she didn't want to leave our parents. And she knew she was going to certain death with them. That's what the family is, the sacrifice of the parents for the children, of the children for the parents . . . [His voice breaks, a long silence, a pause .]

With relation to other emigrations, the emigration of the Jews of eastern Europe has its own particular dimension. The touching quality of the departure does not result only from the fact that they were parting from loved ones. They were also leaving a cultural environment (language, food, familiar places, the celebration of holidays, etc.) that constantly maintained a certain consciousness of identity, even in the least observant Jews. Hence the fears of those who remained: once led astray in modern Babylon, won't the emigrants be forced to lead a life that was less Jewish, and even be tempted to assimilate?

Yacob-Jacques L.:

For parents, it was a tragedy when children left. They're going to go to America, and they're going to work on Shabbat! They knew that people work on Saturday in America. For example, when my older brother left for Switzerland, my mother wept for weeks and weeks. "He'll be a goy, what good is life: wos teug mein lebn, what good is my life? My son will be a goy."

For all the family networks and mutual aid, let us not paint an overly idyllic picture, however. The sense of solidarity does not exclude conflict, jealousy, or simply the exploitation of the newcomers, whose youth and inexperience often made them easy prey. Evidence of this is the case of Golda R., who made several departures. Coming to France for the first time at the age of thirteen, she was tossed back and forth between two uncles, who fought over her work. She then returned to Poland.

When my older uncle, the first one, left for France, I was six weeks old. He left and we didn't hear anymore about him. Thirteen years had passed. I went to another uncle, one of his brothers, who lived in Marseille. He and his wife did some business on a ship. That uncle wrote my parents to ask them if they wanted to send me to France. My father was sick and wasn't very keen about the idea. But, when I heard "Paris," I wanted to go. The uncle sent a contract, and my parents signed the authorization.

I got to Paris. The uncle from Marseille had sent one of his friends from Paris to meet me at the station.

[ . . .] We had lunch and then he went out to send a telegram

to Marseille that he was putting me on the train that night. While waiting, I asked: "I have another uncle here, Sam. Maybe you know him?" "Sam lives next door, in the hotel." "Since my Uncle Sam lives next door, I won't go before seeing him."

The wife told him in French, but I didn't understand, that he shouldn't go there, that he wouldn't let me leave because the two brothers were mad at each other. He didn't listen to her. When my Uncle Sam heard that a niece had come from Poland, that she wanted to see him, he rushed over with his wife. Seeing me, he took me for one of his sisters.

"No, I'm Golda, Brocha's daughter."

"My God! You were six weeks old, and now you're a beautiful girl. Where are you going?"

"Hermann brought me. He sent me a contract."

"Hermann brought you to be a maid in his house, to take care of his children. A girl like you can have a nice career in Paris. I won't let you go to him."

He came down and didn't go to work. He was a very good tailor. He took cloth and made me a beautiful velvet suit and a beautiful coat with a fur collar. Then he took me to his bosses and introduced me. The boss's wife told me that in Paris I could have a good career, that she would teach me to be a finisher.

Hearing all that, the neighbor felt sick. My God, I sent a telegram! He sent another telegram to the uncle in Marseille to say that I wasn't coming, that his brother was keeping me. And the next day, my uncle came from Marseille to Paris. Since he was mad at his brother, he sent that same neighbor to ask me to come down. My uncle went out on the balcony and called the other one, his brother. They made up. And the other uncle came up.

"Why did you bring Golda? What do you want to do with her? You want her to be a maid in your house. I don't want her to go to you. I'm going to teach her a trade so that she'll be somebody."

So the other one left. And what did he do? He went to the police and declared that he had sent me papers, that my parents had signed. The next day, we were eating lunch and chatting, when somebody knocked on the door: "Police!" A policeman

entered: "You're Sam G.?" "Yes." "This is your niece?" "Yes." "She doesn't have the right to be there. You're not the one who brought her. She must leave for Marseille. If not, she must return home, to Poland."

The policeman explained that the brother was within his rights; he had sent a contract; my father had signed. Otherwise, she would have to leave and if papers were sent to her, she could come back later. My uncle said to me: "Don't worry. Return home, I'm going to send you papers immediately and you'll come back." So I returned.

But such trips were not made so easily. It was not until about ten years later that Golda returned to France (preceded this time by her own parents, who had decided to emigrate).

Crossing Borders

Emigrants supplied with valid passports and visas could legally cross Germany, where they sometimes stopped before landing in French railroad stations in Strasbourg, Metz, Nancy, or Paris. Sometimes these passports were false or partially faked. And many journeys, particularly those of political activists, were illegal, punctuated by the most unexpected vicissitudes. The memories of border crossings and tribulations through the countries of Europe and even Asia thus represent one of the strongest points of the narrative: the duration seems to be magnified (events are told day by day, hour by hour), while the rhythm speeds up in a host of episodes and details. People pass spontaneously to the present, and they act out incidents and restore dialogues with an amazing precision.

The wandering often begins in 1914, with the first wave of refugees fleeing the theater of military operations. We recall that Hélène H. was living in Bialystok, which was then located about twenty-five miles from the German border. Her father, a businessman, "who had big ideas for big deals," had gone to Sweden to buy a wagon of hairpins to sell them in the Russian and Polish markets. He was held up there by the outbreak of the war. Hélène H.'s mother decided to leave Bialystok with her three children and join one of her uncles who with-

drew to the Ukraine, to Ekaterinoslav.^[2] The family remained scattered during the war, until the Russian Revolution.

We (my mother, my two brothers, and I) were still in Ekaterinoslav. We didn't have heat; we didn't have anything to eat. We ate oats. My father finally found us in Ekaterinoslav. They decided to go back to Poland. They had come to get him: the Tcheka was already active. He had probably been denounced as a bourgeois. But there was still great confusion, a big mess. They hurried. They sold everything they had, the furniture, the linen. I remember that I went to the countryside with a sack to get bread for our trip. We left with that and a tschainik, a tea kettle. That was very important because there was boiling water in all the railroad stations. You could make tea. With tea and bread, you could survive.

We traveled in cattle cars, passing through the north of Russia, Lithuania, because there weren't any trains, you took the train in whatever direction it was going. I remember very well the train station of Kursk. It wasn't in our direction at all. We spent one or two days on the platform of the station waiting for a train. At that railroad station of Kursk, I'll always remember the people who were there, exhausted, waiting for who knows what.

Then we went on. We tried to get back to Poland through Lithuania. It was very hard because there were still skirmishes.

Another problem was that we had sold all we had, and Soviet rubles weren't worth anything. In order to travel abroad, you needed Tsarist rubles, only with them could you buy anything.

Finally we were close to the Lithuanian border, and we started looking for a way to get to the other side. You had to have a pass and you waited a good long time, at least two weeks, in order to get it. We lived there, on the border, in terrible conditions, in a peasant's house. We didn't have anything to eat; we ate grass that we cooked. There were soldiers wandering around there, digging up potatoes in order to eat them green.

Finally we found a peasant who agreed to take us to the other

[2] Now Dniepropetrovsk.

side, for money, naturally. When we came to the border, the soldiers asked us for a pass: "Who gave you that pass?" "Don't know!" Because what one officer granted, the one at the border didn't recognize.

There was nothing to do but go back to the village. There we waited a while longer. The problem was to find another border runner. The second one was a Jew, a Jewish driver (not a cab, a sort of wagon): "I've got a son on the other side. I'm going to see him, so I'll take you." OK. We got on and set out again. Did they give us another pass? I don't know anymore. He must have chosen another crossing, another entrance. But we got lost. We spent the night in the fields, somewhere in a kind of racetrack. Neither we nor the driver knew where we were going. But in that place we met a peasant, for me the kind they talk about in literature, that old man with a beard, barefoot. And we asked him the way. So he said: "If you go that way, you're going to meet the Red Army, and if you go that way, you're going to meet the Lithuanians. So you have to go that way." That is, between the two, through the woods.

In fact, he gave us false information; I don't know if it was deliberate. We were intercepted by a patrol of Lithuanian soldiers: "What are you doing there? You're spies!" Can you believe it? In that cart, with all that luggage and three children. They took us to a village. They were on horseback, and we were in the cart.

And all of a sudden, from the woods, someone started shooting at the patrol, with us in the middle. The driver speeded up; my brother started shouting. We heard the sound of a bullet: "I got hit!" It was the driver who was wounded. And we, we ran, we ran in order to get away from the shots passing over our heads. My father and mother got out of the cart in order to calm the horse, and since I was the oldest, they made me get out too. And I was holding the tschainik, the tea kettle, because you couldn't let go of that for anything in the world. It was very important. I ran till I was out of breath and I shouted: "I'm going to drop the tschainik, I'm going to drop the tschainik!" You had to run fast in order to get away from the shooting

between the Reds and the Lithuanians, and I dropped the tschainik. It was a catastrophe. There was no more tschainik!

When we came to the village (this time, we had crossed the border), we were thirsty. We asked for water and they wouldn't give us any. They wouldn't give us any water because we were Jews. They saw that right away. They put us in a kind of shed while waiting for the authorities.

[ . . .] We went on, and we came to a little town, I don't remember its name exactly. I think it was called Souvarov. That's where my grandfather's brother F. lived. We went to them, they welcomed us warmly, and we ate white cheese. I'll never forget that cheese. It was something extraordinary, that white cheese.

Georges F. tells of his clandestine entry into France:

I crossed the border with a group. I was the only one, almost the only one who succeeded: out of fifteen, two stayed, the others were turned back. I passed through Belgium and I was arrested. They didn't mistreat us too badly. They asked us where we wanted to go. We didn't say we were going to France; we said we were going to Germany. And they took us to the German border. There, a smuggler was waiting for us, the same one who had taken us to Poland, in Cracow. He knew we had been arrested, the whole group, and he was waiting for us at the border. He had told us in advance to say that we were going to Germany and not to Poland or to France. He knew where they would take us. They left us at the border; they sent us back. Then this smuggler found us. He took us in a taxi and brought us to Gare du Nord. There were fifteen of us, a group of fifteen. Of all those fifteen, two stayed in France—those who could pass through the nets. They were hunting for foreigners. It was me and one other who had a deportation order. He hid. He stayed anyway, until after the war. He passed away not long ago.

Léon W.:

All my brothers left without passports, clandestinely, thanks to smugglers. Yes, they paid. My mother came to France later

because her oldest son was already living in Metz. He sent her proper papers to make the trip as a visit. And when my mother was already in Metz, on a visit, my brothers said to her: "Mama, now you won't go back to Kalisz again. You'll stay with us." "And the children who stayed there?" "Don't worry, they'll come too." I was nineteen years old at the time, and they didn't want to let me leave because of military service. We found a guy at the prefecture, who said to me: "Don't worry, I'll get you a passport." And he told some story about my going to France for an inheritance. They made me sign a paper: "Once you have the inheritance, you'll come back to Poland to do your military service." Sure I signed, and I got the passport. Then I went to Warsaw for the visa, and with that I came to Metz. Two years later, I was summoned by the consulate in Strasbourg. I didn't answer, I didn't go, and they didn't summon me again. That's how it was left.

Here is how Louise M. succeeded in leaving Nazi Germany:

I was married in Berlin, five years before. I left Berlin with two children, a little boy of four and a one-year-old baby. It was a very difficult emigration because my husband had already left for Morocco to see if we could move there, and I was supposed to follow him.

All of a sudden, one beautiful summer day, the Gestapo came to my house. They wanted to arrest my husband. They thought he was involved in some deal of transferring money. But you can't talk to the Gestapo. Three men came at six o'clock in the morning. They searched everywhere, under the beds, everywhere, and when they saw that my husband wasn't there, they said: "You're coming with us." At that time, I had a girl in the house. I could leave her with the children. They took me to Gestapo headquarters, to an office where a man began shouting right away. But I said I didn't know anything:

"OK, we're going to take you to the cellar. Once you've been in the cellar awhile, memories will start coming back to you."

So I really thought that my last hour had come. He said to me: "Now, get out and wait in the hall." I sat down. There was someone else there, a man sitting next to me, who told me he

was a Jew. "What are you here for?" "I don't know." "But you can tell me." I understood right away that he was an informer. And then I realized, without anyone telling me, that they put me face-to-face with someone who was supposed to recognize me, and since he didn't recognize me, the other one in the office had me brought back. All of a sudden, he became almost human: "I'm going to let you go," and he gave me an exist pass. You had to go through a kind of tunnel. I was sure that when I went through that tunnel, they were going to kill me. But that wasn't the case.

The next day, the men from the Gestapo came back: "Show us your passport." I showed it. "Do you have a bank account?" "Yes." We had an account, not very much, but they froze it even so. So there I was, with my children, no passport, and no money.

My parents took us in. I stayed at their house for almost a year. And my husband was in Spanish Morocco, in Larache, with my sister and brother-in-law. Almost the same day the Gestapo came to my house, the Spanish revolution had started and Franco left that little town of Larache.

Even so, I found a lawyer, a lawyer who was a member of the National Socialist party and who became a good friend. The Jewish lawyers I had appealed to at first really were good for nothing, nothing at all. They were liars and hypocrites. But him, after almost ten months, he succeeded in getting my passport returned to me.

It was first to go to Holland, and the permit there was for only four days. After four days, I went to the consulate and when I came, they looked at a list. In the meantime, my German nationality had been taken away, which I didn't know. And they kept the passport. Then, afterward, there were some fateful blows. My little boy, who wasn't yet two, caught typhoid, and while taking care of him, I caught typhoid myself. Finally, even so, they gave me a paper that would allow me to leave and go to Morocco.

Let us follow the odyssey of Julien K., arrested as a Trotskyite in Poland. His trial took place in Warsaw.

The trial lasted almost the entire day. There was a break at night. We weren't prisoners; we were provisionally free. But it took a bad turn. I thought: It's going very bad, I mustn't stay here. I told another one of the accused, the only one who was from Cracow, I said to him: "Come with me. Otherwise, we'll be back in prison." He didn't want to. But I left the court right after the indictment. I quickly got my overcoat in the lobby. I think I even threw a coin, and I left. I meet my own lawyer and I don't say anything to him. He asked me: "You're going out to get something to eat?" "Yes, I'm going out to get something to eat." And I caught the first streetcar that passed by without even knowing where it was going.

Julien K. was sentenced in absentia to four years in prison.

I stayed with that tailor for a few weeks. At first I never went out. Then, I remember I let my moustache grow, and I wore dark glasses—very classic! The organization decided that I should stay in Warsaw for a while. In the beginning, I was wanted. It wasn't the time to leave. I had to wait until things calmed down. Then they decided (my father was also informed) that I would go to hide in Czechoslovakia, going through the mountains.

They took me to the train at the last moment, with a ticket of course. It was the night before Pentecost, and the train was packed. A lot of people were going to the mountains. There weren't vacations like now, but there were a lot of people even so. I get on the train, and, by chance, I overheard two men talking, one saying to the other: "There are police everywhere, they're looking . . ." It didn't have anything to do with me, but I was scared. Then we got to a station and, as agreed, at such and such a depot, the guys came to get me. They gave me a card from the Alpine Club, and that card was valid to cross the border. I was on an outing in the mountains, with fine shoes and a knapsack. Finally, we got to a road, the guides left, and I went down by the road. I was already on the Czechoslovakian side. I went into an inn and saw a big portrait of Masaryk.

Then I got on a train, but it stayed along the border too long to be going to Prague. I was afraid the Czech police would send

me back so I changed my plan and came to Brno, in Moravia, in the middle of the night. I ate something at the station and then took the train for Prague. The address they had given me in Prague was the office of the German Social Democratic party. Those who greeted me thought at first that I was sentenced to four months or four weeks. They told me that it wasn't worth the trouble. . . . I said: "No! Four years!" So they put me in a kind of house where there were a lot of beds and, thanks to their efforts, I obtained the right of asylum, the right to stay in Czechoslovakia.

I rented a room and wanted to study, but I didn't do very much. I visited people in different areas, Trotskyites, people who gravitated to the Communist party. Many of them were illegal, and that's what ruined me. I stayed in Czechoslovakia for eight months. Those illegals were known to the Czech police. One day, there was a big roundup, and I was arrested too.

They found all sorts of brochures, Trotskyite journals, and letters in my house. They kept me at the police station, in difficult conditions, then they sent me to prison with those who were forbidden to stay and common criminals. My father intervened through the intermediary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Czech Consulate. That happened after Bénès's election as president. Then a commissioner made me an offer: "We know from certain letters found in your house that you want to go to France. We also know that the Social Democratic Committee is interested in you. It will help you to cross the Austrian border. Sign a letter saying that you wish to leave Czechoslovakia. The police won't escort you to the border. You'll have permission to stay in Prague for forty-eight hours to arrange your affairs. The committee will take care of getting you across the border secretly. Then you'll get yourself to Paris." I accepted. It's true that I wanted to go to France; that attracted me more than staying in Prague.

I was sent to a town close to the Austrian border. I remember that they were talking about the Popular Front, about Spain. This was in '36. They helped me cross the border, and I was in Austria, very far from Vienna. I took the train—I had to change—and came to Vienna, where a friend of my father was

waiting for me. I stayed there for three months, completely illegally.

Then I did something very stupid. I didn't know and I was so furious with the Czech police: I thought they had cheated me. I found that they hadn't treated me very well because they had put me in a more or less healthy cell, with common criminals. From Vienna, I wrote an angry letter to that commissioner. When my father's friend found out, he shouted: "What did you do? What stupidity! I know he would have helped you go to France. He would have given instructions for the Czech Embassy in Vienna to give you a Czechoslovakian passport. You could have entered France legally with the passport." Naturally, that was out of the question now.

Then I met a member of the illegal Socialist party (this was during the time of Schusnigg).^[3] Meanwhile, my father came to Vienna, and we even went to my grandfather's grave. My father left me some money. Now, in Vienna, I had found a first cousin whom I knew in Cracow. She was a little older than me and lived with a guy who turned out to be a crook. I found them in dire poverty. They really didn't have anything to eat. I took them to a restaurant. I lent them money. And he told stories about his brilliant prospects in the movies, that he would earn a lot. In fact, he had already squandered my cousin's money, and he proceeded to squander mine. I finally wound up pawning a suit! The result is that I didn't have very much when the day of my departure came.

We still had to go through the mountains, on skis, skiing from the high mountains (we had to do this whole expedition in April). I had done a lot of skiing in Poland, in the Tatras, but I wasn't really a good skier. It scared me a little. I left with somebody who was supposed to show me, guide me, like an instructor. He himself was something of a leftist socialist and had decided to come to France with me. He perished later, during the war in Spain. So we left on that expedition with very little money. We got to the Tyrol, to Landeck, and we climbed the mountain to a shelter called Eidelberg. Normally,

[3] Austrian chancellor at the time of Anschluss.

we shouldn't have stayed there, but he made me practice. He didn't want me to plunge into that expedition, all the way to Switzerland, without doing at least forty-eight hours of skiing exercises. It was very hot—I stripped to the waist—so hot in the mountain sun that I got sunburned. I got sick, my face was burning, I couldn't shave, and I had a fever, a very high fever. For about two days, I had to stay in bed. My companion also got sunburned. The result was that we used up our supplies. And we had to eat and pay for that mountain shelter, at very high prices. We spent almost all our money.

We finally made it to Switzerland. But during the expedition, there was another mishap. I lost a ski. . . . In Switzerland, in Susch, we went to a hotel, with the little bit of money we had left. We decided to leave the skis and to hitchhike. In fact, we didn't have enough money to take the train. We were in the canton of Grisons, not very far from Davos, and the railroad belonged to a private company and was very expensive; you had to make a long trip to get to Zurich, Bâle, and the French border. While hitchhiking, he even begged. A Swiss family gave us something. Naturally, the Swiss didn't understand that we traveled without money.

At Zuoz, not far from Davos, the Swiss police arrested us. And I remember that the police were especially outraged by the fact that we didn't have any money. My companion was all right with his papers because he had an Austrian passport; at that time, Austrians could enter Switzerland without a visa. But I didn't have any passport. If only we had had money! The problem is that we didn't have any. I remember that the policeman wrote in his report: "In Schrift und Geldslosen Zustand," "without papers and without money!"

So, they put us in a kind of prison. There were bars and a very nice view of the mountains. We stayed there one night and, in the morning, the policeman announced to us: "You came from Austria; we're sending you back to Austria." My companion answered that that was fine, he was an Austrian. But I said I didn't want to because I was a political refugee and I wanted to go to France. So the policeman said to me: "You can go to France if you have the money to pay for your ticket, and a

policeman will accompany you." Since I didn't have any, there was nothing I could do. I had to go back to Austria.

We returned to the town where we had come down, to Susch. The Swiss police checked everything: such and such a hotel, etc. We left the skis; we couldn't drag them around anymore. And they took us to the border, to Martinsbruck on the Inn: on one side of the river was Austria, on the other Switzerland. There was a bridge. So my companion said: "I'm crossing the bridge," and I was tempted to do it, but he gave me this advice: "Don't do it. If you want to go to France, put up some resistance. You're staying!" That's what happened. I said: "I'm not crossing." I resisted. They really roughed me up. They took me by the collar. They led me by force and dragged me halfway across the bridge. And since the other half of the bridge belonged to Austria, they went back. I stayed on the bridge. Between Austria and Switzerland, in the middle of the bridge.

The weather was quite nice. It was April, the end of April; but little by little, it began to get chilly. I had a backpack. I took out a sweater and threw it on, as if I didn't mind. I stayed on the bridge. The policemen had gone. On the Swiss side, right at the border, there was an inn: a little boy sent by the hotelkeeper came up to me and asked: "Are you hungry?"

Encouraged by this gesture, Julien K. returned to the Swiss side; the innkeeper allowed him to call a contact in Zurich (for a delivery of money from his father) but refused to give him a room for the night and advised him to go to the inn on the Austrian side.

I listened to him. I crossed the bridge. On the other side, the Austrian customs officials, who had seen the whole scene, almost burst out laughing: "Why were you afraid to come?" [ . . .] So I went to the inn on the Austrian side: "How come you stayed on the bridge?" They offered me a room and a meal, without asking for money. They said: "You know, we're having hard times in Austria. Ever since the attempted putsch against Dollfus, German tourists don't come anymore. It's a disaster. Anyway, we hope that someday we'll be reunited with

Germany. We're Germans all the same." OK, I didn't say anything. I slept there. The next day, I wanted to call Zurich again, so I went to the Swiss side; I went back over the border and crossed the bridge again!

On the advice of the Austrian innkeeper, Julien K. went toward Feldkirchen to cross the Swiss border in another sector. On the way, in Landeck, another innkeeper, a Rumanian Jew, came to his aid: Julien's clothes being torn, he offered him "some kind of golfing knickers with white socks; that's what the Germans typically wear (we were in the Tyrol)." Then he put him in touch with the border agents of a Jewish network. They made him climb another mountain and his guide left him alone, showing him a path that went down to Switzerland. It was night, and a storm broke.

The young man had shown me that road but I was completely lost. I had missed the path! I was exhausted, soaked. I kept on going down, dirty, soaking wet. By now it was morning, and I didn't know where I was. But finally it turned out that I was still in Austria!

I came to a peasant's house, and he gave me some milk. He let me dry my clothes, and I slept in his barn. I told him I wanted to get into Switzerland illegally, and he said: "I'm going to help you. I have a field that's right next to the border. I'll show you. One of my cousins has a hotel in Lichtenstein. You'll go to him. Then you'll only have to cross the old Rhine. But stay away from Buchs because that's a border station. The Swiss police check there. Go to Haag, an internal station. Take the train for Saint-Gall, and you'll get to Zurich."

But that's not all. It also turned out that this peasant was a Nazi: "You aren't the first one I've helped to escape Austrian tyranny. Others passed through my field, and by now they're all in Germany!"

Even so, I tell him I'm from Poland. It happens that he's got a daughter, and he introduces me: "Ein Volksgenosse aus Polen!" A fellow countryman from Poland!

He gave me a sickle. I pretended to work, and we crossed the field. He showed me what path to follow when night came.

I did as he said and I got to that hotel, whose owner was probably a Nazi too. Then I got to that station of Haag, I took the train, I changed at Saint-Gall, and I made it to Zurich.

I went to see that woman who sent me money; she welcomed me very warmly. I stayed in her house for a few days. She gave me a letter from a comrade in Cracow, a leftist Socialist, who advised me to appeal to a Polish Socialist association in Zurich. When I went to the building, I learned that the association had been there before the war of' 14, but it no longer existed! They told me to go to the building of the Swiss trade unions. But there was a meeting going on—I should come back later, in two hours. So I went for a walk. I was still dressed like that, in my white socks. It was typically German, but I didn't know that. And the plainclothes cops arrested me: "You're German? Show your papers."

I told them I'm not German but, since my papers weren't in order, they arrested me, and I was sentenced to one day in custody for crossing the border illegally. Then they went with me to get my bags at that lady's house, and they put me in a train, in a barred car. "Where are you taking me?" "To Bâle. We're going to try to get you into France, since you have chosen that border. We're helping you, but be warned that if you don't succeed, if they send you back, we'll have no choice but to send you back where you came from, that is, to Austria."

I came to Bâle. I stayed one more night in the police station; it wasn't a prison. Besides, there's a policeman there who didn't understand. He thought I was being sent back to Germany. He makes a gesture like that: "What kind of blows you're going to get!" The next day, a Swiss agent took me: "You go down that street, there. There's a little field. You cross it and you're in France, in Saint-Louis. You go on, and you'll find a bus or a train station for Mulhouse."

I crossed. I went as far as the station. I saw that there was a train for Paris, but I didn't have much time. I changed Swiss francs into French francs, and I ate something. Everything was going fine until suddenly a French cop approached me and said, in Alsatian dialect: "Sie san a Ditcher?" You're German?

I said no, but since I didn't have a passport, he took me to

the police station. The commissioner, a bearded man, spoke French: "Listen, they've been very strict about the right of asylum ever since King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated. Tell me honestly, who sent you here to France? The International Red Help?"

"No, it's not the International Red Help."

"Search him!"

So they found the paper of the Swiss police.

"Ah! It's the Swiss police! We have to send him back!"

A policeman took me on the back of his motorcycle. He took me to the Swiss border station, holding the paper:

"Here, he's yours, take him!"

The Swiss police were furious. They were in a kind of barracks. They were very friendly, and they shared their own food, a very good meal, with beer. And they got mad: "Those bastards! In the country of freedom, after the victory of the Popular Front in the elections. They send you back like that, a political refugee. It's outrageous, scandalous!"

"You're right, but by the way, I'd like to ask you why I can't have the right of asylum in Switzerland?"

"Why, it's not the same thing. Switzerland is a little country. That poses problems. In France, there are so many foreigners, she can allow herself."

They took me back to Headquarters and explained to me: "We're not going to send you back to Austria again. We're going to try again. Since you went to the train station last time, don't go back there. Take the bus."

I felt uncomfortable because I wasn't shaved. I wanted to go to a barber, but the Swiss police wouldn't let me: "We don't have time!" So, on the French side, I went and got a shave. Everything went well, but all of a sudden, there was a scene like one in an American film I had seen, I Am a Fugitive . One of the station cops came into the barber shop! But he didn't recognize me. When I left I said: "Good-bye, gentlemen," and I remember the cop answered, "Good-bye, Monsieur."

I saw a bus and I asked if it was going to Mulhouse: "No, it's going to Belfort." "OK, that's all right." I spent a day in Belfort. I walked around and ate an excellent meal with so many

hors d'oeuvres that I couldn't finish the rest of it. I thought it was very expensive. I remember what I paid: fourteen francs. Late in the afternoon, there was a train, and I got to Paris that night.

The Host Country

After arriving in France, time in memory passed faster; it flowed in rhythm with moving and changing jobs. Through the diversity of individual destinies, recurrent themes emerge here too: of work, tenacity, effort.

In the "Jewish" trades (tailors, tanners, furriers, etc.), the newcomers followed the network of relatives and immigrants who preceded them. Those who came to France at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century ran little workshops or shops, and the influx of immigrants between the wars provided an abundant and generally submissive labor force.^[4]The economic crisis emphasized the return to "Jewish" trades, organized according to the characteristic system of putting out work from patterns. Recent immigrants, often lacking a resident permit, subject to the competition of their co-religionists, and constantly fearing arrest (followed by expulsion), worked at home, illegally, for poor salaries. Home, for many of them, was reduced to one unhealthy room into which a half dozen people were crowded: freed to set their own pace, these homeworkers, in fact, imposed upon themselves a brutal work load.

Maurice N.:

I was living in that hotel [in Belleville ]; there were only Jews there. There were six of us in one room. My father didn't earn very much. At that time, he was a deliveryman. So my mother helped him, with the four kids. But even so, she helped him a little, whatever she could do at home. And I gave a hand too.

As soon as I was thirteen, I went to work in the tannery. At thirteen. I had had only one year of schooling in France, but nevertheless I had to work. My father was then earning about

[4] David Weinberg, A Community on Trial: The Jews of Paris in the 1930s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Cf. also Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris .

two hundred francs a week. I worked for a Jewish homeworker, as a tanner, which was eighty-eight to ninety hours a week. I earned a franc an hour, so I brought home ninety francs a week; that was an enormous sum. My father's two hundred francs and my ninety francs, that was a lot. And I went on working like that, all those hours, when there was a lot of work. When there wasn't much, you did fifty or sixty hours. And when there was a lot of work, you did as much as ninety hours.

My relations with my boss were very good. He was a very interesting man, who helped me in a lot of things. When I read a book, the two of us discussed it. He was a Jew from Lodz; he was deported later on. I stayed with him until 1936, the time of the Popular Front. He then proposed that I become his partner, but I didn't want to. I was already a radical and I left him. I went to work for another boss.

Several options developed outside the Jewish networks, however. The usual difficulties of every migration then stood out even more sharply: apprenticeship in the language, isolation in a foreign environment, adaptation to other customs. Certain subjects that were recalled in the previous episodes on departures recur, but with a new twist: people stressed the excellence of professional training acquired in the homeland and their passion for work as opposed to the norms of the host country. Furthermore, ingenuity took the more French form of resourcefulness. Henceforth, the notion of progress was confused with integration into the new milieu and a rise in the social hierarchy.

Yacob-Jacques L.:

They had given me a name of someone in the area of Montbéliard—a Jew who might help me. I didn't know a word of French. When I got to his house, he said to me, in German: "If there isn't enough work to keep my own workers busy all week, how can I hire you?" I asked him what I should do. "Go to the surrounding villages." I remember as if it were yesterday. When I left—I was already on the bottom step and he was on the top—he called me, came down: "Monsieur, here's twenty francs." At that time, that was money. But I was proud. That upset me: "Monsieur, I'm looking for work. I'm not a beggar."

I spent the whole day going from village to village. They didn't understand me, and I didn't understand them. I was so tired, so tired. What could I do? At night, I saw a café and went in. I spoke to the boss, but he didn't understand a word. So many years have passed and I still remember. So, I asked the girl who was waiting on me: "Do you speak German?" "Yes." "Oh, I'm saved." I told her that I was looking for work. They gave me a room and the next day, the boss said to me: "I understand now. I'm going to make a phone call." Then the girl explained to me: "They want you in Beaucourt, at Japy Brothers."

OK. I went to Beaucourt. The manager received me, but he didn't know what I wanted. Unfortunately, he didn't speak German. He called a girl who worked in the factory. She saw that I didn't understand. "The manager is asking you what you want." "I'm looking for work. Here's my passport, my visa, everything is in order." "Oh, yes, they called me. OK, what can you do? In our clockmaker's shop, the manufacture is divided into three parts: the first is apprenticeship, molds and wheels; the second is the escapement, the wheel that makes the watch go; the third is setting it in cases and putting on the frame and the hands." The girl asked me what I wanted to do: the first or the last part? She didn't mention the second part, the hardest. But I said that I wanted to do the escapement, to make the watches go. The manager: "Somebody who comes from Poland, who hasn't been to school, wants to do the hardest work?" "Yes, I can do it. I did it in Warsaw." "OK, I'm going to give you that work, but, note, if you can't do it, we won't change your job. We just won't hire you." "Fine, I agree."

So they made a place for me to work. The workers came to watch me. They brought me tools, if I needed this or that. In Poland, you don't see that. And the manager also stayed near me. So I called the girl over: "Tell the manager to let me work alone. I can't work when people are watching me." They left, and, of course, I did the job. The girl took it and brought it to the manager. I knew how it would end. The manager called me over: "What school did you go to?" "Yes, I went to school!"

"What school?" "Michel School." So, he looked in his dictionary of watchmaking schools and didn't find anything. I explained to the girl: "Tell the manager he's wrong; it's my father who's called Michel!" He shrugged, and, of course, I was hired on the spot.

[Two years later, Yacob-Jacques L. goes into business for himself.]

I saved up and I became a manufacturer. I brought independent workers. I always had four or five, sometimes twenty workers, Jews from Poland. I lived in Beaucourt, a village of five thousand inhabitants. Some said: "See, a Jew who can't even speak French correctly and he's a manufacturer already. And us, our great-great-grandfather worked for Japy." So, what did I do? I said to them:

"Listen, gentlemen, what do you do at night?"

"Oh, at night, I go out, I go to a friend's house, play a game of cards, or go to bed early."

"Me, at night, I work until midnight, you know? And on Sunday?"

"I go fishing."

"Me, on Sunday, I work all day long. If you had done as I do, you'd be a manufacturer too. There's no miracle."

The language problem was posed most sharply for immigrants who came to France to continue their studies. Their Polish diplomas were not recognized, and they were forced to begin their entire course of study all over again. Robert S. represents the typical case of the poor student who worked at night to prepare for his examinations and in the day not only to support himself but also to help his parents, who remained in Poland. The trials he endured demanded great patience and an uncommon strength of character. Having arrived in France in 1928, at the age of twenty, he could not pass his final examination until after the war, in 1946, and finally set out on his own.

I arrived in France, in Nancy, on October 28, 1928. I got off at the train station with ten francs in my pocket. I went to see a friend who had already finished school the previous year, and who was living in a hotel. I didn't speak French; in Nancy they spoke German. I said to the owner of that hotel: "Monsieur, I

just have ten francs; I'll give them to you to guarantee me a room for a week. Now, do you know anyone who might put me to work? I need to earn my living, I want to study, and I don't have any money. I don't want charity." And I told him that I was a Jew. "Well," he answers, "I just happen to know somebody who's a Jew." That was my future father-in-law, who had a little factory where he made boxes. No sooner said than done. He hired me. I prepared the boards in exchange for something to eat and pocket money, which I sent home. It wasn't much, but with the exchange rate, it allowed them to make do in Poland.

Unfortunately, my future father-in-law fell on hard times with his operation. I had to look for work and was one of the first students to come up with the idea of going to the streetcar company: I could work at the streetcar depot at night, which would leave me the day for my studies. So I worked from nine o'clock at night to five o'clock in the morning. My work in the depot consisted of washing the cars. At five o'clock, I went to bed; at seven, I was up. I went to school from eight o'clock to noon, from two to five. At five o'clock, I returned home, went to bed to sleep a little, and then started to study and review. I earned a good salary: a hundred fifty francs a week; that was six hundred francs a month. Of the six hundred francs, I kept a hundred and fifty for myself (for my room, my studies, food) and regularly sent home four hundred fifty francs a month, for my parents.

I emphasize that when I came to France, I didn't know French. So I started to work on grammar by taking time from my sleep. And when I finished work on the car, If I had an hour left, I hid so as not to be caught, and I crammed. I can say that the irregular verbs and so on gave me a rough time!

During the summer vacation, I didn't go back to Poland like my friends. I was afraid of getting stuck there for lack of money and not having any means by which to feed my parents. I was obsessed about it. I think that if I hadn't been able to leave again, I would have committed suicide.

So I opted to sacrifice my trip to Poland and instead to work to save enough money for my studies and for my parents' needs.

During the school year, I worked at night since I had to go to classes during the day. But during vacations and on holidays, I worked during the day, as a conductor. And even better: I did two days in one. How? Work on the streetcar was done from five in the morning to one o'clock—that's eight hours. And I started again at three o'clock until late at night. This worked out because the Frenchman took advantage of the fact that there was someone who could replace him. He said: "I want to go dancing with my girl," and it was Sunday, a holiday, or during the week. They knew I was willing to take the shift. At my age, I could work two shifts and, especially, by earning two days in one, I could reward myself with a meal, which, for me, was a real treat. What did it consist of? It's something extraordinary when I think of it now. I could pay myself with a steak, fries, and salad, a meal that was typically French, but for me, it was a royal feast!

I enrolled for the second year. I did it and when the vacations came, I asked myself again: "Am I going to Poland to see my parents?" I made an accounting, and, again for the same reasons, I deprived myself of the pleasure of that trip. I must add that if I had known how things were going to turn out, I certainly wouldn't have made that choice because I never saw my parents again.

For me, seeing how events were unfolding, there was never a question of my going back to Poland. At any price. I brought my sister from Poland, sending her money for the trip. At the outset, I got her hired as a cleaning woman at the cinema. She was a dressmaker. And little by little, she managed to find some customers; she made dresses, in secret, at home. [ . . .]

My university diploma didn't give me the right to practice in France. There were two conditions sine qua non to be able to practice in France: to have an official diploma and, in addition, to be a naturalized Frenchman. For naturalization, you had to go through the union (of dentists), to get their approval, which they almost never granted. I remembered Député S., who had offered me his help. I explained to him: "I have to convert my diploma into an official diploma. I'll do that no matter how much time I have to devote to getting the French baccalaureate.

I'll slave away. But I can't commit myself as long as I'm not sure of obtaining French citizenship." He had me put together a file with all my work certificates. The whole thing didn't take long—he made me a royal gift. On the very day I received my diploma, in 1933, I received the order to pay the costs of naturalization, and I was naturalized. It was rare at that time, especially for a dental student: the union was vigilant in not letting anyone get through; you had to have a helluva talent to get their approval.

Thus, Robert S. set out to pass the baccalaureate. While he prepared for the examination, he obtained a position as attendant in a municipal library (where, despite his protest, they wanted to appoint him). Finally, the great day came:

So, I showed up for the first baccalaureate exam. I remember it as if it were yesterday. There was an open-ended topic: "Romain Rolland, in one of his works (I don't know which one anymore), says that he believes in the future of aviation. Say whether you agree with him and why." With my leftist leanings, if I dare say so, I defended the idea that if aviation could bring people together, contribute to brotherhood, I agreed; but if it had to serve war and destruction, no. And the inevitable happened, of course: I had the bad luck to fall on some turkey who gave me a low grade. By cross-checking, I was able to identify the teacher and I asked him politely to explain to me: "I don't claim that my essay was perfect, but did it really deserve that grade?" He answered me: "Monsieur, in our view the baccalaureate candidate is not asked to state what he thinks but what others, more qualified than he, have said." That meant you mustn't choose an open-ended topic because he judged that the candidate wasn't fit to deal with it.

After hearing this reasoning, what did I do? During the vacation for the second session, I took out of the library the four volumes of Faguet, the best critic of French literature at that time. And I memorized all the authors of the four centuries, Ronsard, Rabelais, and so on. I invested a lot of time, and more than once, I wept with rage; but without it I couldn't go any further. Came the baccalaureate exam, with the classical

subject: "Which do you prefer, the theater of Corneille or of Racine?" Predictably, I grabbed Racine, and recited Faguet's reasoning (since they didn't ask me for my own opinion).

So I get through the first part of the baccalaureate, that was in '37, and started preparing for the second part. And there came the first mobilization, at the time of Munich. I couldn't take the exam. When I came back, I continued to prepare, and then it was cut off for good: the war began.

The epilogue of that "apprenticeship" came only in 1946:

We returned to Clermont-Ferrand, and I enrolled as a candidate for the second baccalaureate. I could have taken advantage of special arrangements, as a Frenchman who had fulfilled his military obligation during the war and who had served in the Resistance. But I didn't want to. I had the first baccalaureate, and I wanted everything to be equal with my French countrymen so that they wouldn't someday come accusing me of having taken advantage of war conditions. It was my right and my pride. So I passed the second baccalaureate, like all the others.

My naturalization, abrogated under Pétain, was now restored. I had only to convert my university diploma into an official diploma. At that time, the law demanded another five years, but in my case, they authorized me to present the five years in a single examination.

I came to Nancy. I worked in a garret (I remember the hotel) during the month of August. It drove me crazy. I knew my material inside out. Now, on the panel, there was one truly comtemptible individual, a pharmacology professor, an anti-Semite who was always picking on me: nothing I answered was any good. To make this clear, I have to point out that one of my buddies, H., who had gone to school with me, had become dean of the dental school. When I told him about my troubles, he himself went to the dean of the School of Medicine and it turned out that the latter was none other than the officer I had served with (as a medical orderly) throughout the war. So he sent for me: "What's this all about?" I explained that I had to convert my diploma into an official diploma. "In short," he said, "you had the right to get yourself killed for France but

you don't have the right to live for France. That's not right and it can't be. Enough already. You've passed the exam. For grades, they'll take the file you had in 1933: you passed the exam once, that's enough. You did all that had to be done as a Frenchman. I can testify to it. Now, let's talk about something else."

And that's how, with the diploma, I could finally set myself up with everything in order.

New Ghettos

As we have seen, in the "Jewish trades," the immigrants formed networks where they were among themselves, more or less isolated in the midst of French society. They certainly did not re-create the environment they had left: the demographic and cultural context turned out to be too different (kosher food or the rhythm of the Jewish holidays, for example, were no longer imposed with the same strictness as in Poland); and migration tended to accelerate the process of secularization begun in the homeland. But people did continue to socialize with Jewish friends, and though gatherings were henceforth held on Sundays rather than Saturdays, people still shared common memories, exchanged news, and were with their own.

Mutual aid societies, or Landsmanshaften, formed by those who came from the same community, multiplied between the two world wars. At first essentially funeral societies, they expanded their activities little by little, eventually including social, cultural, or educational services. In the late 1930s, there were almost two hundred such associations in Paris, which embraced half of the Jews from eastern Europe (more than twenty thousand families).^[5]They evidenced the vitality of immigrant Yiddish culture in the most varied forms: newspapers, libraries, theatrical and athletic activities. Very often, Yiddish continued to be spoken within the family circle, at least by the parents, even if the children preferred to answer in French. Paradoxically, in some cases, young immigrants did not really learn Yiddish until after they come to France.

[5] David H. Weinberg, A Community on Trial .

Bernard P.:

The Jewish community in Roanne then numbered about forty or sixty families, all from Poland, or more or less Polish: from Galicia, Poland, Lithuania, Galizianer, Polak, Litvak : that's who they are. Every Saturday, we got together. On Saturdays or Sundays, probably on Sundays. We gathered in a building that belonged to the community. We had meetings, we took excursions to the countryside. And we also danced; we got together to sing. We were young in those days. But that activity always took place with a Zionist background [ . . .] We lived among Jews. My still rather imperfect knowledge of the French language would have prevented me from living outside that Jewish community. Besides, it's in Roanne that I really learned to speak Yiddish. I knew a bit; I could figure out the alphabet since I had learned Hebrew, but I learned to read and figure out Yiddish in my first months in France.

We lived essentially in a Jewish environment. Social visits, dates—we had them with the few girls from our own milieu. My wife was one of them (my wife here now).

Mathilde R.'s parents, however, decided that the only solution to the Jewish problem was assimilation. So they banished Yiddish from the house on principle and even went so far as to put their daughter in a Catholic school. Nevertheless, Yiddish cropped up in snatches, in the mother's words of affection to her daughter. And the family group preserved the culture of the homeland (Russia in this case) as a point of reference, as if, despite their integration into the French environment, they needed to recall their own distinct identity.

When I was born, my parents had the strange notion that the solution to the Jewish problem was assimilation. OK, they weren't the only ones. But for them, the solution was to play the ostrich, to put their heads in the sand so as not to be seen. So I wasn't supposed to be told I was Jewish. Which meant that I spent my childhood, up to '38, without knowing, consciously at any rate. Finally, there were strange things that stirred my curiosity. For example, my parents, who spoke Russian with each other when they didn't want me to understand, sometimes

said: "They're one of us," speaking of people who were neither Russian nor Polish. I found that puzzling.

"They didn't speak Yiddish?"

No, not at all. They must have known it in their childhood, but they really forgot it.

The only thing is that my mother, in her moments of tenderness, sometimes said affectionate things to me in Yiddish: "mein teures Kind. " I remember that. I had no idea what it meant. Finally she told me what it meant, "my dear child." But in what language? I really don't know what explanation she gave me.

In any case, there was that puzzle: to be one of us, when you're neither Russian nor Polish, what does that mean? I had a vague explanation, consciously; that is, it spun around in my head. I thought that maybe foreigners were ours because they were foreigners. And sometimes they said it about people who seemed French to me and that must have complicated the puzzle even more.

So I lived in that kind of extreme ambiguity, both from the cultural point of view and from the religious point of view, with something nevertheless that was a unifying element, to a certain extent, because it wasn't just anyone who told me at that time that I was a Jew. It was my aunt, my father's older sister (who was deported in '42; I found her name in Klarsfeld's book not long ago).^[6] And that aunt—I would say that in her house, it wasn't Jewish culture, although probably it was in the atmosphere and in the air. But it was a kind of Russian culture. When we gathered together, my parents sang with her in Russian or told me Russian stories. When I was still very little, I had already heard about Russian writers, Russian poets, or Russian composers. In short, Russia was a great magnetic pole. There was no talk of Jewishness.

Political Activists

Political activists (Communists, Bundists, or Zionists, with their multiple shades and variations) also had their own mutual aid societies,

[6] Serge Klarsfeld, a French lawyer who, with his wife Beatte, has been very active in hunting Nazis and collaborators.

youth movements, and cultural groups.^[7]In their own way, these networks fostered a solidarity based on common culture and memory. Thus, the Communist activists, while preaching the dissolution of Jewish identity in proletarian internationalism (unlike the Bundists), were nevertheless grouped in the Yiddish language subsection of the Party. The fact of affinity and residence (the immigrant population being concentrated in certain quarters of Paris: the IVth, XIth, or XXth arrondissements) meant that activists of Jewish origin were grouped in the same cell .

Marc B.:

In 1925, I came to Paris. Since I had good friends who were tanners, I could get work right away. The same week, I got in touch with the Bundists in Paris. There was a café, 50 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois. All the Bundists gathered there, on the first floor, and they created the Medem Club. Because in the meantime, Medem, the leader of the Bund, had passed away in New York. We didn't have a building right away. We organized conferences, and we went on outings, to acquaint the new immigrants with cultural life in France. They put me on the committee of the Medem Club right away. In 1928, Nomberg, a great Jewish writer, passed away. They organized a memorial evening; the greatest writers—Sholem Ash, Schneour—came to that evening. They said: "We'll charge a fee, and whatever we take in will be used to create a library." We collected a certain sum and created that library, which was in that café. We bought a big cabinet, which still exists in the building we bought in 1928. Then, the first thing, we got offers from people who had books, and we bought them. I was one of the founding members of that library. In the Medem Library, there are still photographs of the first committees that created it. There are only two living members left from that committee, Monsieur W. and me. We went on like that. Then, when our movement grew, we rented other buildings, bigger, more comfortable ones. The last one was 110 Rue Vieille-du-Temple. We already had a big building; the library kept growing.

[7] Cf. Nancy Green, The Pletzl of Paris . David H. Weinberg, A Community on Trial, pp. 51–62.

In 1932, we founded the social club Arbeiter Ring. The building, the entire building, belonged to that club. There wasn't a Jewish artist, a Jewish writer passing through Paris who didn't have a meeting in the building—110 Rue Vieille-du-Temple. Not only did we make an auxiliary of the Bund in Poland but also a Socialist movement, the Bund in France. We published a paper, the Wacher, the Awakening. I wasn't particularly one of the leaders; my goal was cultural, the library. In 1932, they also set up the mutual aid society. There were various categories of people who didn't have Social Security. They could enroll in the society and be fully covered. We also set up the community burial vaults in 1938. I wasn't part of that group at that time, but it existed! During the war, in the social circle, they set up a canteen to help women whose husbands had gone into the army as volunteers.

Maurice N.

I became active in the Communist youth in '33 or '34. I was thirteen or fourteen years old. It was in Paris. First I was in the youth of the XXth. Most of them were French. There weren't many Jews, just a few. Right after, I joined the youth of the XIth because there were Jewish friends down there, so I changed my neighborhood.

In the Communist youth, they didn't label you a Jew or a non-Jew. At that time, they were seeking assimilation, like everybody else, like the French.

[ . . .] I played football, did gymnastics. The Y.A.S.C. was a club that had five or six hundred members. Relations with non-Jews? You know, we didn't hang around together. We pretty much created our own ghetto . . .

Among leftist activists, Julien K. followed an original path, independent of the predominantly Jewish networks. We recall that he arrived in Paris after many vicissitudes, at the time of the victory of the Popular Front. After a few months, he decided to go to Spain to fight in the International Brigade with the Republicans. He was sent to the Aragon front.

It really was a strange war. We didn't have weapons, we did some exercises. The rest of the time we argued, we took sunbaths, and from time to time, we shot. The only expedition I went out on was at night. We went to the enemy trenches; we swiped a case of weapons from them. It wasn't a big deal. We had two or three wounded.

Among those who were with me, there was one—I learned much later who he was. He was the famous writer Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four . He was wounded in my presence, right next to me. What was his name? Blair. I didn't find out who it was until years later because he wrote a book on Catalonia under his real name. Reading it, I realized it was Orwell. By then he was dead, because for a long time I hadn't known who he was. He was very tall and, once, when he stood up without thinking, a good shot on the Fascist side wounded him. We took him to the hospital in Barcelona.

OK, I stayed on that so-called front, I went on leave to Barcelona, I went back to the front, then again to Barcelona. There, there was the famous event of May 3, the civil war, the attempt of the Communists to liquidate the P.O.U.M.^[8]

There was a big raid against the P.O.U.M., and that's where they arrested me. They took me to the police station, then to the passport office, Calle Corsega, which they had made into a kind of prison, an illegal prison, because it wasn't official.

At first, you had the impression that it would be terrible. We were four men, they locked us in a little room with no window, with barely any air, without anything: "You're going to sleep there, on the ground." There were also women, but they gave them a nice room, on the first floor, with beds. So, we revolted, we banged on the door, and, finally, after they yelled at us, we weren't locked up in that little cell anymore. We could sleep on a bench, and the lucky ones got a mattress on the floor.

One fine day, they said to us: "Get ready, you're leaving!" They put us in a truck, without telling us where we were going. We thought they were taking us to Carcel Modelo, but no, they

[8] P.O.U.M. was a Trotskyite group.

took another road and we saw that we were leaving Barcelona. We were taking the highway. I remember that I was struck to see the inscriptions of the P.O.U.M.: "Gobierno de la derrota que has hecho de Nin?" We continued on. They took us in fact to the French border. We didn't have any papers anymore, nothing, because they had taken everything from us when they arrested us, even our photos, and they didn't return anything. So we wondered what the French would do with us.

Love Affairs

Emotional life is recalled in the memories we have collected only with modesty and discretion. They do confirm that for the young immigrants of the 1920s and 1930s, even those who were totally cut off from religion, the possibility of marriage with a non-Jew generally seemed unthinkable. In fact, friendships and work relations, as well as the network of associations, favored unions between immigrants or between immigrants and the children of immigrants. This rejection of mixed marriage was already much less evident in the next generation.

The tale of Golda R. allows us to follow the lively and chaste love affairs of a girl who came to France in the 1930s. In its mix of sentimentalism, melodramatic situations, and theatrical strokes, the episodes she relates seem to come straight out of a popular novel. Despite loyalty to Jewish endogamy, doesn't this very "dated" style of amorous life indicate a certain form of acculturation?

When you're in Paris, you meet people. Matchmakers proposed marriage. They introduced me to a young man. In Poland, he had been a doctor, in Minsk Mazowieck. Here he couldn't practice. He wasn't allowed. So he made deals. He was very religious, very orthodox, but my father wasn't so religious. My mother was already used to Paris. She had to work on Saturdays. When he came, she hid the machine. She wasn't permitted to work. He was so religious! When he got a letter on Saturday, he wouldn't open it before night, before seeing a star in the sky.

"Golditchke (he was a Litvak), I want to marry you."

"But I'm not religious. You're too religious for me."

We went walking on the Buttes-Chaumont. It was very hot, but he said that he was forbidden to go drink in a café. It wasn't allowed; it was Saturday. And he was very stingy. I didn't want a miser. Since he was a peddler, I said to him once, in a joke:

"You sell sweaters—bring me one, a white one."

Comes Saturday, he didn't bring me anything.

"But I would have paid for it! Go away and don't come back."

Still, he came back every Saturday. [ . . .] At that time, my father died. He had a cousin, a woman, who lived near us. He came back, went to see his cousin, and then came to our house:

"My little Golda, I saw your father in a dream. He told me that we should get married, the two of us." "Listen, if my father had loved you when he was alive, and if he ordered me to marry you in a dream, maybe I would do it. But my father didn't like you. He didn't appear to you in a dream. Stop pestering me. Go find somebody else."

[ . . .] In the shop where my mother and my brother Leibl worked, there was a presser. He said to my brother: "It seems you have a sister. I'd really like to meet her. Why doesn't she come?" As soon as I heard there was a young man who wanted to meet me, I didn't want to go there. My mother said: "Come help me turn one or two coats." I didn't want to.

One Sunday when my mother was out walking with my cousin, she met him, Chil. He came up to my mother and asked her: "This is your daughter?" "This is my sister's daughter." "Will you allow me to walk with you?" "Why not?" They continued walking, and they arranged that the next rendezvous would be at our house. Chil began coming to our house; he came every night. Once he said to me: "No luck. I talked about you and now I meet you. Why didn't I meet you sooner?" "What difference does it make since you're going out with my cousin?"

He visited her for maybe six months. I said to my cousin: "Rosette, how long are you going to drag on with Chil and work for nothing for your brother? You can get married. You'll work, you and Chil, you'll be able to live." She answered me: "You're right." She went back home and told her brother that

she was dating a young man and wanted to get married. Her brother started roaring: "You want to take a presser! You wretch, you'll die of hunger!" Another imbecile would have answered: "What more do I have in your house?"

So, this Chil was a presser. He didn't have any money, no house. He slept in a hotel. He didn't squander his earnings; he kept it to take her to the movies. When Rosette came to us for lunch, we told her to bring Chil: if there's enough for three, there's enough for four. Let him eat with us. My mother said: "Listen Rosette, I'm going to rent you a room. Don't work anymore for nothing for your brother. Get married."

So, they decided to apply to city hall. Rosette had trouble getting a birth certificate, but her mother sent her some sort of certificate from Poland. When her brother Max learned that she had been to city hall, he made a scandal: "Your cousin convinces you so that you'll be miserable. They want to bury you!" It was Saturday night, the brother came to our house, and they started fighting, her brother and her fiancé. Tables and chairs were flying, a disaster! After such a battle, there was no more talk of marriage.

Chil kept on coming to our house. He had become my brother's friend. He liked it at our house. If he didn't show up one night, he missed our home. He came every night. Once, something happened. It was maybe eleven o'clock. I was already sleeping, but my mother had brought some work home from her boss. She was still up. The windows looked onto the street; he saw the light and came up.

My mother looked at Chil and realized that he hadn't eaten all day; his veins were blue. She came to wake me up:

"Golda, come do a good turn. Give Chil something to eat; I don't dare invite him."

I got dressed; I went in: "Why have you come so late?"

"I was coming from my sister Esther's, and I saw the light."

It was winter. We had pickled herring, jellied calves' foot. There was always something to eat in our house. "Chil, do you want to eat something?"

I served him, he ate. My mother went to bed, my brother was sleeping, and I stayed with him. So he said to me: "Golda,

I want to tell you something. Fate wants you and not Rosette to be my wife."

"Chil, that's impossible. Since you were going out with Rosette, I can't go with you."

I knew everything that was going to happen. Chil started to talk. He didn't stop talking, all night long, until it started to turn light. He talked so much that I finally said yes. I gave my word. And he: "I swear to you that Rosette is nothing to me. She's not the one I have in my heart. It's you that I love, but I was wrong, I did everything wrong."

My mother had heard everything. Just imagine. In the morning, when she came in, he rushed to her and hugged her: "I was supposed to become your sister's son-in-law; I prefer to be yours."

No sooner did I say yes than I regretted it. The neighbor came in, Roïsse. We were all from the same shtetl, Otwosk. When she heard the story, she said: "Golda was for you, not Rosette!" And my brother: "Since that's how it is, Chil, don't stay in the hotel, with all the expenses. I sleep alone in my room. Come, you'll stay with me."

But things turned out badly. A few months later, Golda and her family discovered that the "fiancé" had returned to Rosette and her family. They threw the traitor out.

And Rosette took him back. But a little while later, her brother told him that he had no more work for him.

"If that's how it is, I'll take a gun and kill myself. I'm going to kill Rosette, and I'll kill myself too. I shamed Golda, and she was dearer to me than anything. You won't get away with this."

Max was scared, and finally they got married. What kind of wedding did they make? They bought two slices of ham. There wasn't anybody there, and they called in a kind of Jew who blessed them. And they went to live in the hotel, in that "fine hotel."

We were mad. I had sworn that I wouldn't talk to my cousin anymore. Then, thank God, she got pregnant, she had twins. And the two children died. A while later, she got pregnant again, and that child also died. They said to themselves: Our

children are dying because of our guilt about Golda. She must forgive us or we'll never be able to have children. I didn't know anything about all that. One day, my mother met my cousin in the street. Rosette came up and kissed her:

"Aunt, dear aunt, I have already had three children who died. Golda must forgive me; everybody says that Golda must forgive me."

"I myself forgive you right away," said my mother. "Golda also forgives you. Have children who live with your husband to be a hundred."

But I didn't want to see them anymore, not her and not him.

[ . . .] I was working in a knitting shop as a winder. The boss's wife had a sister, and we became friends. The poor girl also had two children, and she got sick. She had cancer. We got along very well, the two of us. When I finished work, I helped her, I bathed the children. She knew she was going to die. She had a very good husband. One day, she said to me:

"You know, Golda, when I'm dead, I want you to marry my husband. My children love you. You see that he's a good husband. Promise me to marry him."

"How can I make you such a promise? You're going to get better. You'll raise your children."

I didn't promise her, but she died. The children loved me very much. The little boy was already four years old at the time; the older one was six. He said to his father: "Papa, I'd like you to marry the lady who works at Madeleine's." Avrom also wanted to marry me; he didn't want anybody else. He came to our house and stayed until two o'clock in the morning, talking with my mother. He had a big knitting shop, a cottage at the Porte des Lilas, but he went bankrupt. His wife's illness had cost him all his money. One day, he came and said to me:

"Listen, Golda, now I am poor. I don't want to drag you into poverty. But promise me that you won't take anybody else."

"I can't promise you."

So he went to work in Alsace, in partnership with his brother-in-law. They worked in metals; they bought cars.

Avrom made a fortune as a scrap dealer and returned for Golda. They married in 1937 and moved to Elbeuf .

Generation Gaps

Already in the old country, a gap had appeared between a generation of parents bound to a set of traditions and the generation of their children attracted to "modernity." Yet another gap separated the generation of immigrants and the generation that grew up in the host country. A series of contrasts would manifest themselves, for example, during the immigrants' periodic trips home to visit parents who had remained in Poland and to introduce them to their grandchildren who were born in France. These migrants find a different but familiar world, religious practices they have abandoned but that they pretend to resume, so as not to give shock and out of respect for their parents. Their own children, however, discover a strange, totally unfamiliar world, where they themselves become objects of curiosity for their cousins from Poland.^[9]

The gap between the generation of the immigrants and the generation of their children is therefore defined, essentially, as a function of the familiarity each of them maintains with different cultures. The immigrants had come out of a world in which Yiddishkeit was a fact of life: whatever their ultimate development, they preserved its imprint and often felt nostalgia for it. They judged contemporary life and, more particularly, their children's behavior in reference to values they received from that lost world. Conversely, in spite of their integration into the host society, they maintained a sense of distance from it, sometimes quite minimal, but irreducible nonetheless. Their children were impregnated by French culture, which was for them another fact of life. There resulted differences that affected not only language or tastes but also spontaneous reactions, life-style, and, finally, the consciousness of Jewish identity itself.

Robert S.:

It's a terrible thing to ask a person who was born in one country and who immigrated to another to adjust to the soil, the language, the environment, the conditions, the life of that new country. It doesn't matter how much you try to learn a language: what is ours to determine, we manage to do. But what is not ours to determine, that's what you take from your

[9] This is one of the subjects recalled by Maurice Rajsfus, Quand j'étais juif [When I Was a Jew] (Paris: Mégrelis, 1982), pp. 102–113.

homeland. You can't be a Frenchman or a Pole just because you want to. At a certain age, to try to adjust to the life of a country that you don't know from Adam, that's something else. Especially when you want to possess the language and its refinements.

It wasn't enough for me to read the articles in the Temps . I also wanted to understand the jokes in the Canard enchaîné .^[10] If you have to explain a witticism, it loses its charm; it's not a witticism anymore; it's detracting from something beautiful. On the day I could finally grasp the nuances of the Canard enchaîné , I said to myself: you have only barely begun to taste the richness of the French language. Still, I could take heart. I was no longer that ignoramus who had to ask what they're talking about and how this is eaten. I could follow when fireworks erupted at the table with the children, who handled the language correctly because they were born in France. I didn't want to seem inferior to them; it was my vanity. I'm the only one who knows the price I paid to obtain it. But I did it. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, I have the sense of having achieved only partial success. Not because I didn't want it, or because I didn't pay the price. But because it can't be had. There is something that is not determined by you, and that makes you what you are. The native ground—I don't have it.

[ . . .] There is something that predisposes every Jew in certain ways, especially when he comes from those countries where Judaism was at the base of life. There's no other life possible. The Jew is marked, whatever he does. Even if I had wanted not to be, I couldn't not be Jewish. In my soul, I think, I feel like a Jew. I accommodated myself to the demands of social life in France. But if I had to choose, if I have the possibility of going to a meeting or a ball with French people or a Jewish meeting or ball, I wouldn't hesitate: my heart pulls me there, I feel better there, I'm with my own.

If I could have opted for a double nationality, things could have fallen into place more easily at least. That would have

[10] A satirical weekly.

made my life less complicated. It's a line of argument I can't use in talking with a Frenchman; it would shock him, right, because he wouldn't understand. I'm not complaining. I have shown that, among civilized people, you can find a modus vivendi . For example, with Monsieur M. [his daughter-in-law's father ], I would much prefer to talk about literature, but we can't get together, because if you let him talk, it would be Maurras or Déroulède,^[11] and I wouldn't touch that subject. But he wouldn't come to me and talk about my authors. So we meet on the ground of wine and cheese. And there I'm ignorant. Anyway, I had to learn, not because I learned to like them, but because I have no choice when I'm in a group where I can't raise other questions.

With all that I have seen, I must conclude that I haven't changed one iota on the Jewish level. I have remained just as I was, minus religion, because I thought that that wasn't the essential thing. The essential thing for me is the culture that is transmitted by Judaism, by the writers and by the religion.

The difference between me and my father was that of one generation that gave life to the other. The difference between me and my sons is a leap of two or three generations. It's impossible to adjust to it. Yet I know, God knows, the pains I have taken to try to follow my children, to understand them. But there are moments when I don't understand, things escape me. Do you feel the soul of a child?

The lack of connection with the generation born in France is manifest particularly when the problem of mixed marriage is posed: even with the most open-minded parents ("I want his happiness above all"), there is a sense of a private reticence. When they express their regrets more openly, they find consolation in the notion that their children, in spite of everything, still feel Jewish. By what criteria? In this respect, the State of Israel sometimes plays a paradoxical role: Robert S., former Communist fellow traveler, like Maurice N., former Communist, converted subsequently to a certain solidarity with the Zionist movement. Both declare their pride in seeing their children share those feelings.

[11] Maurras, Déroulède, symbols of French right-wing nationalism.

Robert S.:

I couldn't leave my children and settle there, in Israel. In spite of my sorrow about it. I saw that the children wanted to stay in France even while my heart was drawn there, there, there. . . . I had everything to make me happy, in France, but there was an element of dissatisfaction. I missed the essential. Because if you had to choose between the two, I was more Jewish than French. Let's say the word, let's not be afraid: I was a Jew.

By what criteria did I raise my children? Judaism: I have an awareness of having done the job of passing on what I received. I told my sons the Aggadah^[12] as well as the Jewish past: the destroyed Temple, all they have suffered, the wanderings through so many countries, the Inquisition, and so on. That they know. But they haven't lived like me in the milieu where the same thing, when it's told, weighs more. A history told in its context weighs differently from history taken out of a book. I told them a page taken out the context of life. Take a book, no matter how interesting it is, read a page from it—what does that give? It gives what it can give. I did my best, but I was aware that never (and for good reason, it wasn't possible) will my children be what I am, that is, an uprooted Jew. But still a Jew.

So I brought up my children with the idea of Judaism. When Israel was in danger, they were on the list of those who wanted to go as volunteers. So both of them remained Jews in their soul. Of that I'm proud.

Maurice N.:

My son has his own opinion. I don't want to influence him. We talk, we talk a lot. . . . He supports Israel. When there's a demonstration for Israel, for the Jews in Russia, my son is there. He doesn't miss a demonstration. But he's not committed politically. I think he's very disappointed by all the parties, like me, maybe. But when there was war—every time he wanted to enlist. He went to the embassy to enlist.

[12] Moral precepts and parables of the Talmud.

He has two children, a boy and a girl. They got a liberal education, without religious beliefs; but they know what Judaism is. They're beginning to know. They know they're Jews. They're for Israel. Especially the little girl—she's very Jewish.