PART ONE—
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY

1—
From Salonika to Sefrou

Setting:
Constantine between the Two World Wars

"Everything happened together," "we were always in each other's houses," "the ghetto, after all, did us a favor": all the women who describe the city between the two world wars recall a closed space which stopped, significantly, at "Breach Street" and where you were with your own people. Far from complaining about being confined, they recall a rich world where social relations were intense and incessant. Far from denouncing the absence of privacy, they exalt the close acquaintance everyone had with everyone else, an entire population composed of only relatives, neighbors, and friends. Besides, those three categories were superimposed on one another: neighbors were like members of the family, friends were our cousins, our cousins became our spouses. In this homogeneous space, "private life" was unthinkable; on the contrary, today, deprived of these close relations, life loses its taste.

Claire A., Constantine 1916:

I was born in Constantine; I am the last of fourteen children. We were born in a kind of house, "Dar Mahmud Ali," which was very famous, a little like the mosque here: everybody knows where it is. There were thirty-three families there and no family had fewer than six children. And the houses, what was special about them is that they didn't close. The houses were open and you knew family X just as well as family Y. You were with family and everything happened together. You knew what your neighbor bought, you knew your neighbor's poverty as well as your neighbor's wealth. And anyway, they were all

Jews on Rue Ferrand. You see the high school, the synagogue, it was on this street, down by the hospital, the barracks. So imagine thirty-three families with those children who grew up, who had more children, everybody knew everybody else. There were two stories. We ourselves had two rooms and a kitchen. Once a week, Mama washed us, my father dried us, and then my oldest brother dressed us. And we had a table, a round one, my father cut the bread, he threw pieces of bread like that, and we stuffed it in the plate to augment the soup.

Those are memories that stay with you for your whole life. Of course, there was hardship as well. We lost my father, he was a shoemaker, he did everything, poor man. He sold cloth, he gave so much credit that they didn't pay him, he sold shoes, he went bankrupt. Then he did shoemaking. . . . Poor Mama, she had a tough time. There were a lot of things we didn't have, but not love.

Alice B., Aïn Beïda, 1913:

The family, we were always in each other's houses. First, it wasn't far, not the kind of distances you have here. You went out of one house, you went back to another one because everything was close by; you went to somebody's house, there were my aunts, my cousins, my cousin Yvonne who lived on Rue Thiers—she's in Marseille now—and you went out, you went to the movies, you went to the casino, on Saturday. In fact, they called us the pillars of the casino, we went there so much.

You visited the family almost every afternoon, visiting back and forth. First you had your mother Yvonne and your aunt Nono, every day, every day they came to our house, then it was Vivi, then it was. . . . When there was some event, no matter what event, everybody ran to see them.

Some came to our house, we went to their house. First, Mama, if you remember, she went down to your mother every morning to have coffee and your mother, she came in the afternoon. . . . They were very close down there, very. Daniel, Jacky, they don't have any pals anymore. Down there, every one had five, six pals. Roland he had Sylvain, Guy, Vivi.

"Were they not cousins?"

Yes but, even so, cousins but also pals. . . . There was Guy A., the hairdresser, Jacques's brother, Adelin, I tell you: at least seven or eight. There was Prosper, my cousin. See, we loved the family so much that we didn't have any friends except for our cousins.

Manou B., Aïn Beïda, 1926:

The ghetto, after all, did us a favor.

"How?"

Because you did what you wanted, you stayed in your own element. There weren't any strangers coming in, no mixed marriages, not all this stuff we see today. I, for example, I know that for Kippur, it was marvelous because we had a lot of synagogues right there in the ghetto. Across from the boys' high school, you see the Rue de France? There's Rue Thiers, Rue Damrémont, that whole corner there, right up to the Place de la Brèche, there were only Jews living there.

A man, born in Constantine in 1916. (Says in an objective tone of voice, without measuring the effect of unwitting humor):

The Jewish quarter has a particularity, it is typically Jewish. You can't say it's a ghetto, but a little Jerusalem in Algeria.

A woman, born in Aï Beïda in 1907:

It was a little Jerusalem, Aïn Beïda, I swear. There were a lot of families who were very religious, very pious, you were hand in hand in that village, eh, you loved each other a lot and you knew each other well.^[1]

Tunis, at the Beginning of the Century

A miserable childhood, right in the middle of the Jewish quarter, the Hara: Tita, born in 1902, recalls the house where she grew up

[1] With about thirteen thousand Jews, Constantine was one of the most populous centers of Jewish life in Algeria between the two world wars, after Oran (twenty to twenty-five thousand Jews in the 1930s and 1940s) and Algiers (twenty-three to twenty-six thousand). Aïn Beïda numbered one thousand in 1931, and fewer than five hundred ten years later.

with her parents and two brothers. We have several descriptions of what she calls the "Arab house." Whether this house was in Algeria or Tunisia, it always evokes the same images, associated with the same impressions: the shortage of water and the drudgery that imposed; the lavatory which had to be shared with the neighbors, and the consequent immodesty and discomfort; the smallness and, at the same time, the neatness of the room occupied by the entire family; the courtyard as a place for meetings and as a female bastion; the life that circulated among the cells of that organism and through the courtyard.

When the same persons indicate their subsequent move into Westernstyle apartments, they feel no need to describe them, since they continue to live in a similar environment, whereas the Arab house belongs to the past and is no longer familiar. Rather than life in an apartment, people then recall, as in Constantine just now, life among the apartments, life that circulated from one house to another.

"What was your house like?"

My house? One room.

"Only one?"

One room. There were toilets: not in our house, for everybody. There was the courtyard; there, everybody had his own corner.

"A single room . . . and a kitchen?"

No! A single room! There was one corner inside and that's where you cooked. When it rained, you did the laundry; you did everything in that corner.

There was a mat, a piece of sheepskin. In winter, we sat on it, my mother and me, next to each other. We used the canoun [a clay brazier ] to warm up and my father sat on a chair next to the table to pray and read, and read, and read. . . . When my father finished the meal—he ate a little salad, a little bread, and was content—he said the prayer and stayed like that until he finished digesting. Then he told us a story. Mama made coffee. He drank and finished his story. About 10 or 10:30, he got into bed and said Shema Israel Adonai " [the profession of faith ].

"How did he read? Was there enough light?"

How! We had kerosene! No electricity, no; kerosene. You

put it in the room, on the cabinet. Sometimes, when you didn't have enough, you used candles.

As for me, ever since I can remember, there was water in the house. We were in the house of Caïd Nessim, a big house. We had a well but that water was salty. You cleaned the house with it, did the dishes and the laundry. But fresh water, the water seller brought us that. He had a water skin on his shoulder. "Hey water seller, bring water!" You took a little, you washed the laundry and soaped it. Then you rinsed it in the well. Sometimes, there was spring water. Fresh water.

"Where did people wash?"

In the basin, at home. Always.

"And the Turkish baths?"

Ah yes! The Turkish bath, there was one. But every day at the Turkish bath? No! We didn't have the money! The Turkish bath, you paid for it. Women went there once a year, twice . . . three times. For married women, it was an obligation! But it was expensive. Two hundred fifty, that was something! Who could go there?

Tita doesn't cross the threshold of the house except sometimes on Saturday to go to the port or the public gardens. She spends her day playing in the courtyard with her little neighbors.

When I was little, I didn't go to school because we were poor. My mother couldn't outfit me or buy me a blouse or shoes or school things.

World War I breaks out. Tita is thirteen or fourteen years old. Only an event of such magnitude can send her rushing out on an adventure: to leave the Hara to see the troops sail. She will never reach the port, barely a mile away.

I was with my girlfriend and I said to her: "Come on, we're going to the port to the parade of Jewish workers who are leaving." She said to me: "Shut up. Us, go to the port?" I insist, she says: "Fine, what else have we got to do anyway?" We went and we came to the church, the one of the Gate of France. When we get to the Residence House [the Résidence Générale, symbol

and seat of the protectorate in the center of the European town ], I said to her: "That's enough. I want to go back home. I'm scared." Going to the port, we could have been followed by some bad boys. What did we know? They could beat us up or . . . anyhow, we went home.

Married to an old clothes dealer at seventeen, Tita moves into the sort of house she has lived in since childhood: "From one dump to another, that's life." In the double room she occupies, she will have seven children and two miscarriages; she will not leave the ghetto until 1952, when she immigrates to Paris. Her jealous husband keeps her shut in and under close watch. This seclusion left ambivalent memories on Tita: on the one hand, a strong resentment against her husband; on the other, the memory of the modest joys obtained by the intense complicity between the women who shared the same courtyard.

With Aouïda, everything was fine, except that he was jealous. He would start up with me. I said to him: "But you really have nothing to complain about! The house is clean, dinner is ready, and I keep quiet." "Yes, but you want to go out!" "I don't want to go out! I don't!" In spite of everything, I wasn't sad like here. Because it was an Arab house: here's one neighbor, here another, there, yet another. . . . Here Shmina, here. . . . They would stand at the window talking. As for me, I'd be at the window too, looking at them. That would amuse me a little! It wasn't as if there was no one to talk to, like now.

He was too jealous. Sometimes he'd come home early; work hadn't gone well. I didn't know when he was going to come back so early. He'd find me standing around, and chatting with the neighbors: "Why are you there? Get into the house!" What a bother! I'd go back to the room. "They're all outside and I'm the only one to come in? Am I a rat or a snake for you to lock up?" "Look out the window!" Do you realize how tough it was?

When Aouïda died, I went everywhere: to Kalaline, to Bahri. Whatever he didn't let me do when he was alive, I did afterward.

One day, the neighbors enticed her into violating her husband's prohibition and attending an Arab wedding. Fifty years later, the escapade is told with relish.^[2]

Once, there was an Arab wedding. . . . That old woman I told you about worked for them. She made mhamos [a kind of semolina ] and other things for them. . . . They said to her: "You're coming to the wedding?" As for me, I was pregnant with the little one, in my seventh month. She says to me: "So, you're coming with us?" I said to that old woman, Meinou: "Yes, I really want to go!" I had made a bsal ou loubia [a stew of beans and onions ] on the canoun, under the table: everything was neat. Aouïda was sleeping. Softly . . . I took my shoes, I put them on, and I went out! She asked me: "You're ready?" "I'm ready!" "Come out to the courtyard so Aouïda doesn't see you!" At three o'clock, we left. In the meantime, the cat spills the meal, the stewpot on the floor! Aouïda wakes up, gets up, and sees that meal. . . . He comes out and shouts: "Hey, Tita! Tita, Tita!" And where is Tita? At the wedding! You know what time I came back? Maybe, no kidding, it was in summer, nine, ten o'clock! But there, not all alone, with the neighbors! Ah, that night! Poor me! What he couldn't do! "By God, you won't come back, slut! [Laughs ] You won't come back into the room tonight! You sleep outside!" There I was right in the middle of the house. The woman who was with me: "I beg you, do a favor, for me!" He had locked himself in: "She could die for all I care, she'll sleep nowhere except in the street tonight! Or in the toilets." One of my daughters, Hnina, was crying. She went to get Deïdou. It was far away, his house. She was crying and calling from downstairs: "Uncle! Uncle!" "What's the matter with you?" "Come down! Come down! Father has locked Mama out!" He came running. He begged, over and over again. Deïdou was respected: "Hey, Aouïda,

[2] The same sort of woman is found in the memories of Albert Memmi, La Terre Intérieure [The Internal Land] (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 21, who recalls his mother: "Even now I am amazed at the character of my mother, an almost mysterious blend of trickery and resignation, of suffering accepted and revolt intact to the end, of submission to the extraordinary harshness of her fate and the liveliness and tenacity of a weed, the confidence of a wild animal, born, raised and having spent almost all her life in the Hara, until that fabulous departure for that world that was unreal and crazy to her, Paris."

The same character appears in Georges Memmi, Qui se souvient du Café Rubens? [Who Remembers Café Rubens?] (Paris: J.-Cl. Lattes, 1984).

open up! Aouïda!" At first, softly, nicely, then, finally: "Shit, Aouïda! Open up!" He knocks on the door and finally Aouïda came down: "Wait till your brother goes and you'll see what I'm going to do to you!" I said to him: "What can you do to me? Beat me? Go ahead, beat me! You want to slit my throat with a knife?" Finally, Deïdou stayed a while and said to him: "Come on, eat some dinner!" The other one answered: "What dinner? There it is! The cat ate it!" Then he asked me: "And you?" "I ate!" Then we stayed like that, on two benches, one opposite the other: Then he started to talk and talk. . . . And he became coarse. . . . I let him talk until he'd had his say. Then, we stayed like that. I slept standing up. What could I do with him? He was born that way. Finally, he slept and I slept too. . . . We didn't sleep together, though, in the same bed. Never. Ever since I had Habiba, he slept on the bench and I slept inside on the bed with my children.

"Why?"

He didn't want to. He was disgusted. Ever since I had Habiba . . .

Tripoli Between 1908 and 1920
A Magnificent Hole

Camilla N.'s memory of Tripoli at the beginning of the century is the memory of a world of plenty. Unlike the previous witnesses, Camilla grew up in a rich family, open to the outside world, mixed with non-Jews. But the memories of grandeur arise mostly from the big house in which all of life's dramas were played out, from the patio teeming with noise and activity: abundance prevailed, men and animals abounded, including an entire population of white and black servants, clients, craftsmen, and artisans who worked for the family; visitors and relatives bustled about. Beyond, the town was nothing but a "hole," but it is recalled as a place rich in human and natural resources and so important politically that the great powers sent only personages of the highest quality.

Tripoli was the capital. It wasn't called Tripoli, Libya; it was called Tripoli of Barbary. When we were in school, it was

Tripoli of Barbary and I remember that there were only sixty thousand inhabitants in that whole capital: I had studied it in the scuola elementare [laughs ], that's why it stayed in my mind. It was very small, insubstantial, nothing much to speak of. Only, it was like le Isole Lipari, if you like, where Sultan Abdulhamid (I don't know if you're familiar with the story of Abdulhamid, but you must know that he was a most terrible tyrant) sent those who supported freedom. That meant you were in contact with high-class people in that hole. In that hole which wasn't a hole, because on one side was an oasis with very tall palm trees that were very imposing and on the other side was the sea, the open sea. Without a port, without anything at all. There was no port, there wasn't anything, in fact. What was it then? It was a beach, where a few families had settled. And the rest, a small town: there was the ghetto, the Arabs, the Europeans.

What made it special was that Tripoli had been Turkish, but it couldn't remain Turkish because everybody was out colonizing. The Germans had colonies, the French had colonies, the English had colonized Egypt, they had Syria and all that. Anyhow, they had taken a lot of things. And Italy, which was just born, wanted her share. Only there was a lot of competition because the Germans wanted to occupy Tripoli. That meant it was extremely important politically and that's why there had to be politicians. There was even a consulate; there was almost nothing, but the men they sent there, from the political point of view, were very able men.

Camilla's father occupies a central place in her childhood memories: "I can't remember anything about him that wasn't extraordinary." Generosity, grandeur, ingenuity ("He was ahead of his time"), tolerance—all the qualities she recognizes in him are illustrated in the life of the house and the caravanserai attached to it.

There was a house that looked out onto a caravanserai. In the middle of that caravanserai, there was a small garden. And, all around, there were all sorts of animals. . . . In the morning, he [my father] woke me up to give me a cup of warm milk which had just been drawn. [Later, she will give details: "In the dining

room, there were all kinds of fruits, all the earth's seasonal bounty ."] Then we would go out onto a little terrace, overlooking the caravanserai, and we saw the horses being washed and combed and groomed. We would watch.

For example, at that time, there weren't any pipes, there wasn't any water. We had cisterns, yes, we had cisterns in the courtyard. There was rainwater. Okay, but to take a bath, you had to have Negroes to bring the water up. There were a lot of servants because down there it was easier. But him [my father], what did he come up with? He had made a bridge like this [gestures] and he put a big contraption on the terrace. And when he came home at noon and at night, he used to take a shower.

The Fezzanis, they gave us a lot of gazelles, parrots, marmosets, small leopards. The leopards, my father gave to the governor, they put them in a zoo. As for all the others, the caravanserai was full of them: peacocks, talking parrots, there were four or five of them in the house, canaries, dogs, everything. It was impressive, so impressive.

Istanbul, Between 1910 and 1930

Like Camilla N. between Tripoli, Tunis, and Paris, Laure A. has always lived in comfort, often luxury. Neither of them suffered a loss of status in moving to France. But Laure A. also recalls the splendor of her childhood home and the sense of being superior to others comes through in all the details of her story.

I was born in Péra. Being the youngest, I was the only one in the family to have had that privilege. The others were born in little villages, not very elegant. All the rich Jews were in Haskeuy but me, I was the smallest, the most advanced, I was born in Péra. It was a chic place. When I say I was born in Péra, people take me for a snob. But it's because I was the youngest. Mama wanted to move. She thought it was common down there, so we came to Péra.

Then we came to Kheidar Pasha. That was another suburb, like Enghien, for example, where there was fresh air. It was very bourgeois, you know, we were the aristocrats of the place.

Everyone lived in his own house. They were two-story houses. So you had a lot of servants, there would be ten of us at the table, and we had ten servants in the house. Papa and Mama, that makes two, and six children, that makes eight, the governess, who ate with us, that makes nine, and grandmother brings it to ten. Downstairs in the kitchen, there were as many servants: there was the cook, there was another governess, a maid who was almost a governess; there was a chambermaid; there was a girl who helped the chambermaid; there was the girl who ironed, there was the laundress. Anyway, there were a lot of people, I don't know. Oh, there was the servant with white gloves who waited on us at the table.

It was a different life in Turkey, we were free. We went to Moda: like Enghien, you might say, only nicer. There was the sea, there were big hotels; in summer, we vacationed there, we'd take the small boats and just go. And there was dancing; we used to dance with Turks.

Salonika Between the Two Wars

Gabriel D. begins his tale with his date of birth, "1911, the official date; the informal date is 1909," then he links up with "Salonika at that period." He does not describe the city but, as with Constantine and Tunis, the warmth of human relations .

Well, people lived, people visited each other, everybody, because in Salonika, it's not like in Europe. The family was very close. We got together all the time, we saw each other all the time, we would never miss being together on a religious holiday, we went to see each other and wish each other happy holiday.

Ida O., born in 1906 into a rich milieu, has memories of a more differentiated society but also talks of lost happiness. Of that country of which she knew only Salonika and its surroundings, and Athens barely, she repeats: "Greece, it's marvelous!"

There were three categories of people in Salonika. There were the poor poor, the middle class, and the upper class. We lived on one side, like Neuilly here; it was on the sea, and there were

boats that came to get us. In the daytime, people didn't go out because it was so hot. From one o'clock to four o'clock, everything was closed. And at night we went to the sea. The house I knew with my parents was on the sea. And even if you only had a hut, you still had the sea for yourself.

These are the descriptions of the places where all these Jews grew up: illuminations of circumscribed spaces, reduced to a house, a street, a quarter, while the rest of the city remained in a kind of shadow and the rest of the country seemed almost not to exist. At a time when cars were rare and the means of communication barely developed, many people did not really travel through their own native land. At most, the name of a summer resort, a beach, a spa comes up in the memories of adolescence. It is not the image of a picture postcard that we are given—not a landscape, not a view of ruins, not monuments, but the evocation of a social fabric. Nor do people talk about the climate and fragrances of the Mediterranean. Yet the family environment and the savor of food that people prepared together and shared recur in all the memories. Images of wholeness come up repeatedly—Reader, have you counted how often the words "everybody" and "each other" are used? Whether one knew poverty or affluence, human relations had a powerful intensity.

A Society of Mutual Credit

To be among your own, to live together, to visit one another, to marry with your own: among the Jews of North Africa, more than among others, this is both memory and ideal. This is happiness. However, tensions were not lacking and people do not hesitate to recall them. Crises were also the spice of life. The friendliest words could be a prelude to tragedy and seem to provoke it; demonstrations of generosity were also demonstrations of power; mutual exchanges were not without social competition. Each anecdote reveals the rivalries, the threats, and, hence, the constant wariness they imposed. An ostensibly innocent social game, the visits and receptions: they illustrate the conviviality that prevailed in Tunis, Alexandria, or Cairo between the two world wars as well as the atmosphere of prying: everyone did it and everyone was the victim of it.

Georges X., born in Tunis in 1908, recalls his paternal grandmother, "talking all the time, a kind of easy, pleasant, witty speech":

She didn't visit the other families, not out of any disdain for them, but because she was so attached to her own family that that was enough for her. So, they came to see her on Saturday morning, you know? My grandmother used to sit on a bench, so either her old women cousins or even cousins from my grandfather's side would come by. And they always came with a handkerchief and a key. A handkerchief because they had to have a handkerchief in their hand; and the key, the key to their house. And all the women did this [gestures ] and there was a constant jiggling of keys around my grandmother. That really made an impression on us kids, that. . . . And then came the men, my grandfather's brothers. Not all, some of them. And that went on until noon, with conversations you can just imagine: this one and that one, what she did, what she said. In short, a lot of small talk. Then at noon, everybody left. And the light was incredible! You can only find that light in Italy. You know that Saturday light. . . . In Rome, you find that light. . . . But here, never, never, never do you find that light.

Gioia A., Alexandria, 1909. Told with wit.

You want me to tell you about the receptions? They were magnificent, those receptions! My mother had tons of lady friends who received, one the first Monday of the month, another the third Wednesday, one the fourth Thursday. . . . So the ladies came. And, as far as I remember, my mother was very liberal, she had Italian and Egyptian friends; that is, she didn't make any distinction. And they served; on a silver tray there were engraved silver jam dishes and around, there was a place to put the spoons. The jam dish itself had a crystal bowl inside where you put the jam. My mother spent her life making jam from dates. It was so good!

So the date jam, they were big yellow dates. You cleaned them, you pitted them, you replaced the pit with an almond and you cooked them with cloves. Now, there were at least two jams, quince jam and another one.

"And they let you come to these receptions?"

Yes. We came home from school. The maid who came to open the door for us told us: "Go to your room today, it's the 'bul .'" Bul, there's the same word in Hebrew and Arabic, it means reception. So I'd put a big bow in my hair and put on a dress and I go to say hello to all those ladies, very hypocritically. And they said: "How pretty she is, how she has grown!" I was short and fat with fat thighs. [Laughs ]

With Edmond H., born in Cairo in 1909, the memory of the receptions becomes frankly critical. Imitating the commentaries that would have followed the parties:

"Why, what a reception, what a reception! What didn't they have! Just imagine, my dear, that she ordered such and such a thing from Groppi's. She ordered such and such a thing from Hildis. [And if they were kosher ], she ordered from so-and-so. . . . But you know, three days she worked. . . . And grandmother and the cook! And Madame So-and-So made the kubebat, the other one the pastelles and the zambuzek, and the cakes and all that. . . . You know, my dear, she was wearing a coat! Her husband, when he was in Europe last year, brought her a fur coat. And then, when her little girl was born, you saw the diamond he gave her?"

And that's how it was. Unfortunately, it's gossip. Okay, but it didn't stop there. Madame So-and-So was to give a reception in two weeks. While she was there [at another reception ], she told the others: "Come." But she said to herself: the first one to entertain did thus and so but I have to do better. This was the kind of sick mentality that you found in Jewish families. That's my opinion and I'm sure it was the opinion of many others, especially many husbands. They said to their wives: "Just because Madame So-and-So invited forty people, you have to invite sixty? Where are you going to put them?" "Why, that's not important, there will always be room for everybody." "But how are you going to manage the serving?" "Why my sister's going to send me her servant, and the neighbor's servant will come help me." "And the dishes?" "Why I borrowed some dishes from the neighbor." And so on. That's how it happened.

Behind these courteous exchanges of visits, words, delicacies, there was calculation and judgment of the deeds, merits, and talents of every woman, one-upmanship, all the subtle strategies of social classification. Rich pastries, gestures, outfits were all pieces of information everyone could use in the game of social climbing. Was it a minefield? That is not how people remember it, for, if you knew the rules of the game, you were sure to find partners, friends, future mates among the same actors. In fact, people remember the community where they grew up as an enterprise of mutual aid where it was not necessary to be related to lend a hand. The social cohesion that people emphasize with such pleasure was the sum of all these credits and debits that bound individuals together. Moreover, if you were not from the same family, you could become a part of it, and not only by marriage.

One woman, Suzette, born in Tunis in 1911, reports the facts from before World War I. (Later, her husband joins her.) They begin by talking about first cousins.

She : I have to tell you that my cousins, if they were adopted, there was a reasons. It was because my aunt lost the boys, so she sold them. She sold Albert to Ba-Lalu. Ba-Lalu was a clerk for her husband. But that, that's not adopted, that's symbolic. Khalu Bank [i.e., the "uncle of the bank" ] also, he sold his boys: Georges, wasn't he with the son of the shoemaker Mesh'ud? So! Yes, but not adopted, sold.

Nani, he was with Ummi Nejeïma, he slept in her house, he stayed with her. Loulou, he was almost adopted by Corinna N. Frida [another cousin ], she was adopted, and Esther, and Lucie my sister, poor girl.

Lucie, she was adopted by Maïssa. They were my parents' neighbors. When Lucie was born, she was real pretty, she had very beautiful eyes, all that. Maïssa said: "No, the real beauty is Gilberte, but Lucie has the eyes" [Lucie was later to lose her sight ]. And since they didn't have any children, Lucie went, she slept in their house. She wasn't adopted, not really.

So, it's because they didn't have any children that they adopted her. And the X.'s too, they were friends and neighbors of the S.'s, they took Frida. They took her completely. But without a formal contract or papers or a civil status or nothing.

He : And Judith, she was taken away, it's terrible. She took the names of her adoptive parents, she didn't want to go to her mother anymore, she didn't want her father to greet her in the street.

"What word do you use for adoption?"

He: Mshtebnia, Shtebnet. It must be from the Torah [from Hebrew ], in Arabic, they don't say shtebnet .^[3]

Sétif at the end of the last century. Suzanne T., born in 1910, begins the tale of her life by recalling the material hardships her father knew in his childhood. In passing, she gives a first example of how one member of the family took care of others who had less. In the course of her autobiography, which takes us to Constantine, Batna, and Algiers, this practice recurs several times: family responsibility is one of the connecting threads that weaves through the whole of her memories.

My grandfather was in the war of '70. He was from the Elbez family, my grandmother was from the Guedj family. My father came from Sétif. He was the seventh in a family of twelve children, seven boys and five girls, two of them twins. His father was a mattress maker, he changed the cloth on old mattresses and made new ones too. Life was very hard in those days. My grandmother would cook for weddings, communions, baptisms. It was not easy for her to work and also take care of her family. One year, there was a very bad flu that took my grandfather.

Later on, my grandmother also died. She had children at an early age. In those days, girls were married off very young. The oldest girl was barely sixteen. She was already married when her parents died. She couldn't leave her brothers and sisters alone. In Sétif, the houses had big courtyards, upper floors, and balconies that went around the courtyard. My aunt had rented out all the rooms. Around the courtyard, on one side, she had set up bedrooms, and, on the other, she had set up a big kitchen

[3] It is indeed an Arabic word in its local Jewish pronunciation. Istabna : tenth verbal form, "to make someone one's son."

and a big common room. She herself had her own children. She worked for people as a servant. Her husband was a house-painter—in whitewash, of course; oil was for doors and windows—and he was also a glazier. He had a hard time earning a living. When her brothers and sisters started growing up, she sent the boys to learn a trade. As for the girls, there were no options. The girls were sent out as servants.

Then the aunt marries off two of her sisters and one brother and begins to breathe a bit more easily. Time passes.

In 1928, Suzanne, who is eighteen, marries her cousin Leon, a carpenter. They are in Constantine, in a house with a central courtyard that is home to forty families. The young couple occupies "a large, long room" on the first floor of the house.

We were barely married a month and a half and we didn't have anything, we still had to buy everything. . . . One night, we saw my father-in-law and mother-in-law coming. We were surprised to see them. My father-in-law had lost his young sister in childbirth. She had two boys. And a few months later, her husband followed her. He was very rich, he had warehouses for hides and a shop where he sold leather to the shoemakers. Nobody wanted the children. They had tried to take them for a little while, but it didn't work. The young one was very nice. But the older one, Joël, was a daredevil. He was ten years old, and his brother was eight. After the funeral and the week of mourning, my father-in-law and the whole family gathered to see the estate left by the brother-in-law and sister. When they opened the warehouses, they were empty and the leather shop was also empty. There was nothing left. So they found their sister's father-in-law; he was in the same trade as his son. They asked him why he had taken what didn't belong to him. It belonged to the children. He answered them that all his son's wealth came back to him, that he didn't recognize the children, didn't want to hear about them. They were alone and disinherited. Nobody wanted them. So he put them in the public orphanage, while he figured out what they were going to do. The night my father-in-law came to see us he wanted his son to take in the older one to teach him his trade. The younger one, the

Z. family adopted him; they didn't have any children, and he took their name.

My father-in-law got a letter that if he didn't take the child out in a week, he would be adopted by the child welfare people; that they would change his name, that he shouldn't try to see the boy anymore. The boy would be lost. Of course, I didn't want to take him in and my husband didn't either. Our house was just big enough for us. I needed time to have my own children. They left and we just didn't know what to do. The next day at two o'clock, we had to be at the office of the child welfare people. My husband signed and so did I.

And that was the start of my woes. . . . And since then, nobody ever came to see what became of him. They washed their hands of him. I wasn't comfortable with him around. He stayed until he was twenty-five. He left the night before his marriage.

In 1930, the couple, who have a child and are responsible for young Joël, leave for Batna, where the husband becomes an independent entrepreneur. They move into a little apartment.

In Batna, you couldn't find workers; you had to send for workers from Constantine, guarantee them a bed and food, and pay them; they didn't want a hotel or a restaurant. Since he [the husband ] needed them, we took them into our house. We arranged two rooms in our house, they ate with us, I washed their clothes. Four workers, Joël, and my husband: six men. My daughter was a few months old. I had to take care of everything all by myself. And I was pregnant.

In 1938, the family is now in Algiers and numbers four children plus Joël. Now, Suzanne's youngest sister, whose husband abandoned her to join the Foreign Legion, gives birth to a daughter. The event takes place in Suzanne's house.

On January 25, a Sunday morning, my husband went out to buy his paper. At that time, there was no paper seller, no grocery, no bakery in the neighborhood. He had to go to town for that. I myself was up in the laundry room doing my wash. My daughter came running up: "Mama, come fast, Auntie N. is sick." I went down and she said to me: "I'm having the baby."

I was alone with the children. I sent my daughter to call the neighbor, an old Arab woman. Seeing me in a panic, she said to me: "Don't worry, it'll be fine." A half hour later, she gave birth to a little girl, Josiane. But she wasn't any bigger than a baby cat. [Three months pass. ] With every passing day, she became a normal baby. We didn't know where the father was. One day, we got a letter and, from the numbers and letters on the envelope, my husband guessed where he was: in the Foreign Legion, in Sidi Bel Abbès. My husband went to see him, to see if he could do something. He spoke with his commander but he had signed up for five years. My sister went back to Sétif with my mother a month after the baby was born, leaving me with the baby. She didn't see her again until she was eighteen years old.

The family tribulations continue. Suzanne will have nine children altogether, the births spread from 1930 to 1947. One of the photos that accompanies her autobiography shows eleven young people, lined up in a row, all of whom she raised to adulthood. In the 1950s, when the oldest daughter got married, the marriage soon fell apart—and it is again Suzanne who took her in with her son.

Such memories of an intense, hectic life, devoted to taking care of one another, feeding children you didn't bring into the world: many other women share them as well.

Here is the tale of another transfer of children in a family from Tunis, between 1906 and the end of World War I. First, the maternal grandfather "adopted" his first grandson at the time of his birth: blessed with six daughters, he had no son to say Kaddish^[4]on his deathbed. Then, the father of that child died and the grandfather took in the whole family—three other children and their mother. Between the two events, his daughters were married off, but the house wasn't left empty since other members of the family lived under the same roof .^[5]

Dialogue between Georgette, born in 1899, and her nephew André, born in 1906:

Georgette : It's André, the oldest. He had his bed in our house.

[4] Prayer for the dead.

[5] A similar memory opens the autobiographical narrative of Jules Tartour, Carthage (Paris: Promotion et édition, 1969).

André [interrupting ]: They put me in my grandfather's house a week after I was born.

I : But why did the grandfather want a son so much?

Georgette : Because there were six daughters and that's all. He took the oldest boy.

I : But was that a legal adoption?

Georgette : No, he lived in our house. It was next door.

I : In the end, who did live together?

Georgette : In our apartment . . . let's see, there was Mama, Papa, us [six daughters ] and André, that's all. Ah! There was my aunt, my mother's sister, Geija. She was in our house because she was older than Mama, but she never got married. She was a midget.

André : Hunchback, hunchback.

Georgette : Small, and she had a hump, there. She stayed. Mama didn't want to leave her. She's the one who raised us. And she stayed in our house permanently, that's all.

André : She lived in the maqsura [a closet in the apartment ].^[6]

[Nine years later, four sisters are married off.]

Georgette : Afterward, his father died and then we lived together on Avenue de France. There was Marie and her four children, Papa, Mama, Olga, and me. . . . The aunt was dead by then. . . . Oh, no, they had also taken in Mama's brother, who was divorced. He came to sleep in our house.

André : He was divorced, Kiki? Oh, I thought he never got married.

[6] This character of the poor relative, who is so much a part of the furniture that a closet serves her as a bedroom, recurs often in memories. Further on, we shall encounter "tsia Bergana ," p. 61. The character can also be found in the features of Rachel, "an old ageless Jewess," in the autobiographical novel of Nine Moatti, Mon enfant, ma mère [My Child, My Mother] (Paris: Stock, 1974).

Finally, here is a formal adoption. It takes some effort, but this time the boys take the name of the aunt who takes them in.

Louise G., Aïn Beida, 1921

When my parents died, I was eighteen years old and it was my grandfather M., my father's father, who took us in, my three brothers and me. We stayed with them till I got married when I was twenty-one, and I left my poor brothers all alone.

"Alone with the grandfather?"

Sure, but even so. . . . There were two of them who went to war. The war of '39–'40, that one. Then, once the war was over, they came back to Aïn Beïda and were adopted there. It's my aunt and uncle, my father's sister. She didn't have any children and, seeing that my brothers were alone, they took my poor brother F. and, after the war, she took G. They took the name of the M.

[As for the third brother ], he got married to a cousin, Simone, a first cousin. My father and her mother are brother and sister. . . . And since the father of Simone, my cousin, was in banking, he also chose to take a job with his father-in-law.^[7]

Good and Bad Deals

This subject of professional relations that intensify family relations comes up in many memories, from Salonika to Morocco. If, in the women's tales of their past life, we see solidarity or selfishness exhibited especially in the domestic space, for men, those values also intrude themselves into the economic area.

Family networks generally provided a springboard for professional activity. You got your training, you got a job, you formed a partnership with a relative; sometimes you broke with them. When that family network was missing, the narratives insist on ingenuity, hard work, and initiative to explain economic success. The image of the self-made man

[7] Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide [The Suicide] (Paris, 1897), p. 159, defines the Jews as "a small compact and coherent society having a very strong sense of itself and its unity." Other sociologists after him have characterized that society by endogamy, a less marked distance than in other groups between different social strata and between intellectual and economic factions, observations that are all substantiated here.

is often proposed and highly esteemed. We will see that success is not universal. There are those who suffer from extreme poverty until their dying day.

Papou N., Salonika, 1894:

[Going back to the middle of the nineteenth century, he recalls the activities of his grandfather. ] He worked as a partner in the flour mills of Salonika, the Alatanik [?] mills they were called. It is fair to say that he knew his business; he was familiar with grains. When my grandfather died, my father's oldest brother took his place, still in grains. Okay.

So my father was raised in his family. When he was about twenty, he took over some of his father's trade, especially in grains—his specialty was durum wheat. The durum wheat of Macedonia was famous all over Europe and was sold in France. In this way he started his work, that is, his relations, with France. He signed a contract with the French consul in Salonika who, along with being consul, did a little bit of business on the side. So, my father exported wheat to France. He was attached to the consulate and he became his dragoman, as they call it, because the consuls in Turkey needed somebody from the country who spoke the language and to take them to the prefectures, the city halls. . . . That went on for almost five or six years; in the meantime, he met the Belgian consul in Salonika, who made the proposal that he represent Belgian metallurgical factories in Turkey. Since you're so good in exports, he said, you can certainly take care of imports. And, in fact, my father started to do just that. In the meantime, since my oldest brother finished school, he gave him the import branch; that is, he gave the representation of Belgian metallurgical factories, still in his [the father's ] name, David N., to my oldest brother. And he's still at it today.

Meanwhile, he also met a producer of Russian oil. Because all the oil in Europe came from Russia, from Batoum; that's the port on the Black Sea where all the deposits were. He got an oil warehouse from the Mentachok Company, as it's called, for all of European Turkey, and he was director of the warehouse. So, on the one hand, he takes care of that, and, on the other,

my oldest brother takes care of the metallurgical branch. And he's still attached to the Belgian consulate as a dragoman and very proud of the fact. . . . My third brother finished school in the meantime and went into banking in Salonika and, well, he pursued his career.

Then comes the Balkan war of 1912–13. Crash, everything collapses, including Turkey. As for the oil, the Russians don't want to send any more to Salonika since Salonika isn't Turkish anymore, it's Greek. There are different laws, different regulations, customs, etc. Poof! Everything falls apart, the metallurgical deal too because European Turkey is divided up. So there was all of European Turkey, with all its supplies in Salonika, and it's cut into four: one part for the Bulgarians, one part for the Serbs, one part, in short. . . . So what happens? My oldest brother went to Constantinople, where he still continued to represent the Belgian metallurgical factories. And my father in Salonika continued with the oil, but on a very, very, very modest scale.

Comes the world war of '14. Now, that's really the catastrophe.

During the war, the N. family will again find itself in Marseille. In the meantime, let us return to another family called N., one we have already seen in Tripoli. International ventures in big business are also presented as a series of risks to be exploited intelligently; the father doesn't "meet" any European consul but he "finds himself there," at the right moment.

Camilla N., Tripoli, before 1900:

The whole hinterland of Africa at that time, that is, the ostrich feathers, the finest skins they made into bags, it all came from Fezzan. And it was the Fezzanis—I don't know, of course, maybe you should know, among the Ar . . . [She was going to say "Arabs" and catches herself ], among the blacks, Fezzanis were very advanced, they were the best; at that time, they had a matriarchy. So those people brought their goods to the closest beach. It took them three years to get there. Riding on camels. So they came there, and my parents were there.

There were enormous possibilities with those caravans from the interior, with extraordinary riches, you know. And they needed a certain cloth, a specific type, a color. So, naturally—it's really because of my father, he had that knowledge—they [the father's brothers ] left to sell the ostrich feathers that were brought there in such great quantities. They left, one for Tunis, two for Manchester; one stayed in Tripoli, while his son was in London.

When the caravan came, it was something extraordinary, with all those Fezzanis. The camels stayed outside the walls. Because the camels that came from Fezzan were racing camels, for the trip, they couldn't come in. They brought gold, elephant tusks.

In England, one of my uncles—along with my father—they set up a small factory in Manchester. For white cloth, of good quality. Because they were buying right and left, they were able to find exactly what they wanted, a white cotton called Asso di Pique, that's the trademark. Then, they made them blue cloth and then cloth for when they died; then they brought them sugar and tea, and what else I can't even begin to know. Whatever they needed.

In Cairo in the 1930s. Henri Z. (born in 1913), venturing out from the paternal protection, went into business without either training or capital. He was tremendously successful, however. Our hero was close to the royal entourage, politicians, chiefs of police, the biggest businessmen. He tells a spirited tale, and even the epilogue—the ruin following the Anglo-French-Israeli action of 1956—is recounted with humor.

In '40, a friend proposed that I charter a ship called the Zamzam, an Egyptian ship blockaded in Japan. It had to do with delivering a letter of guarantee to the Misr Bank because the ship belonged to the Misr group. . . . I worked on my father little by little until he finally agreed.

Well, we made the Zamzam deal, which was enormous at the time. My father, scared as he was. . . . My idea was to fill the Zamzam with merchandise on our own instead of taking freight from this one and that. The other way around, I've got a ship,

let's fill it up. When the documents come, well, the banks are there: merchandise that comes to the docks, especially in wartime, there's no problem. But my father didn't want to. He was perfectly happy with the profit from the freight. I had friends who bought tea. A case of tea originally sold for eighty piastres, that is eight francs [a pound ]. When it got to the docks of Alexandria, they sold it for twelve pounds a case; from one pound to twelve! That story of the Zamzam, that was the memory of my life. In short, after that, I said: "No, I can't follow in my father's footsteps" and I started my own construction business.

"But did you know anything about building?"

Very little, very little, practically nothing. Obviously, I learned. Practice makes perfect. And we built a good part of Cairo, the new buildings, of course, in Zamalek and in all of Cairo.

Henri Z. then built the Shepheard's, the Hilton, and other symbols of modernization of that large metropolis, one of which was "a building twelve stories high with a surface of at least two thousand square meters, a luxury apartment building, one of the most beautiful buildings of Zamalek, no doubt about it, an absolutely divine location on the Nile." He explains how he got into big public works, won all the bids, and, especially, how he conceived of his most grandiose plan to bring running water to all the villages of Egypt—a project he figured at fifteen or twenty million pounds sterling—and how he submitted it to the ministry. Let us listen to that episode, for it indicates clearly the climate, the places, and the maneuvers that were necessary to bring off big deals.

That, it's the project of bringing water into all of Egypt. My idea, that was on July 22 or 23, 1954, the ministry would announce that it was giving water. Because July 22 was [the commemoration of ] the abdication of Farouk. My idea was to avoid a public tender since I had created the project. And fearing—since we were a Jewish business. . . . They certainly weren't anti-Semites, but I did say to myself: "All the same, in the present situation, aside from Israel, there are incidents all the time." I said to myself: "Let's try to get an Arab involved in my deal." There was an Arab engineer who worked as an ad-

viser for me because we had to have 90 percent pure Egyptians. So, I had this fellow, who was a businessman himself and my adviser. It was a day during Ramadan, his name was Ismail. I said to him: "Tonight, come have dinner at the Automobile Club so I can tell you about a project that's going to knock you off your feet." He came. Meanwhile I myself had already seen the head of the cabinet, who went nuts over the project and said to me: "Why, all that's very nice, but he won't understand, I have to explain it to him [he was speaking of the minister ]." What I wanted was for him to give me the work and put the whole government, the bookkeepers, and the experts behind the enterprise . . . so they would control all the prices and give us a percentage of the total amount. I went to the Automobile Club that night and explained the project to Ismail, who, yellow as he was, turned red. That very night, I was summoned by the head of the cabinet, to whom I had already explained the whole project. In less than six weeks, all Egypt knew about the project of the pipeline! There was a factory that made the pipes of asbestos and cement, whose president-director general was M. M., and his engineer, B., a graduate of the Central school,^[8] was director of the factory. The head of the cabinet called me in and said: "Here are the letters you're going to give to all the businesses so they'll submit bids to you." I went to M. and told him: "Here." M. looked at me and said: "That can't be right." "What do you mean, that's not so? I'm not telling you that I'm inviting bids, I'm telling you you're going to have an order of four million sterling on condition that you offer good prices." He tried to sabotage the thing because his factory couldn't produce so much. Four million sterling in two years! . . . As I saw it, I didn't need M. anyway. I could set up a factory in three weeks; I had all the contacts in Italy. It was Italian pipes that would have come set up the factory for me, and I didn't even have to pay for the factory. I explained all that to B.: "He doesn't want to! Let him go." And we set up a factory. . . . Then this guy N., who worked for some business in Egypt, left the country and went to work for Edmond de Rothschild.

[8] One of the most prestigious French schools of engineering.

Right away he sent a representative to finance the operation. This representative came to me and I told him: "Nobody asked for financing." I was afraid they would cut me out of the deal, and, in fact, that's just what they did. The Lyonnaise des Eaux was interested in the deal. Twenty million sterling, that's not small potatoes! And they talked to Ismail, who was my partner. We should have made two offers, one in his name and one in ours, in exchange for sharing the operation. The Lyonnaise des Eaux insisted and went into partnership with Ismail. So, they were forced to make a public, even international, awarding of the contract. I knew in advance that Ismail and we would have at least a third of the contract. So, instead of dealing in 1954, we negotiated on December 22, 1955.

It required letters of guarantee from the bank because the government demanded a bank guarantee of 400,000 sterling. What bank was going to go along with us? I had some money in Switzerland, which I declared confidentially at the bank. . . . We get the letter of guarantee. In February 1956, someone from the ministry said to me: "Listen, you'd better resign from all your business interests right away." I had created a special company for the pipes, and then there was the regular company I worked in. "Appoint somebody, but resign, it's in your own interest, believe me." I did put in a straw man and I resigned from all my business dealings. So I left in February or March 1956; a few months later, it's the infamous war of '56. My father was interned; everything was confiscated. I was about to sign a contract with Pont-à-Mousson for four million sterling with at least 10 percent . . . in partnership with the Arab who had refused to sign the contract—because he was an Egyptian. I had set up the whole operation from A to Z, they finished all the work, and I didn't even get to see it begin . . . and I was out 400,000 dollars. I'm laughing today, but . . .

"And you already had bases here in France?"

Bases I had, but I had to bring the money back to get a contract in sterling. At that time I was building the Hilton Hotel, the city hall . . . I had five million in civil revenues . . . five million pounds! That's not peanuts! And a million sterling . . .

"I think you really have quite a sense of humor . . ."

What's past is past. You have to forget about it, and that's all.

Here is the account of the difficult social rise of Suzanne T. of Sétif. As far back as her family memories go—to about 1870—their material circumstances were hard: they worked and lived in poverty, and they died young. Her maternal grandfather was a tinsmith. Her paternal grandfather, we recall (p. 38), was a mattress maker, her paternal grandmother, a cook. Orphaned young, Suzanne T.'s father was raised by an aunt, servant to a pharmacist and wife of a house painter. He left them to do his military service and got married right away. But the war of 1914 broke out; he wound up at the front, was wounded and disabled.

He didn't have any toes left; he had shell fragments in his head; very often he didn't see anything out of his eye. He coughed all the time; his face was always swollen from coughing so much. He had spent seven years away from home and had gotten into the habit of drinking more than he should have. When he came back from the war, he wasn't the same man; of course, he was sick. He received a miserable little pension. He didn't know how to write; you had to be intelligent to fight and get a good pension. Every time he asked them to increase his pension, they refused. And the little bit he did get every three months had to go for something or other. He needed two packs of cigarettes every day and a liter of wine every day, not counting what he drank outside. He didn't do anything at home. My mother was forced to pay him for all the things I mentioned, and many times she gave him the money she earned painfully. He was never happy. My mother was miserable with him.

She worked from morning to night, nonstop. She did laundry. She had regular customers: rich people had their laundry done only twice a year; it took her at least two or three weeks to finish. She went to wash at the school of the nuns. I was little, so she took me with her.

Suzanne had to earn her living from a very young age: she was hired as a children's nursemaid and then as a maid.

At twelve, I got my certificate from school; the exam lasted three days. It was in July; in August I started working. I took

care of a child, from morning to night. The parents were Spaniards; they had a sandal factory. There was a woman who took care of the household, and I took care of the child. I got fifteen pennies a day for two years. Afterward, I wanted to learn another trade, dressmaking, but to learn a trade, you had to pay. I went to work for a so-called dressmaker, to learn a trade. She had four children. I had to tend to the house, take care of the children, run errands. Afterward, if she had time, she would teach me to sew! With me she had a maid she didn't pay. For two months, I was patient, then I got fed up and I left. I went back to work for some people from France; he was an engineer of roads and bridges. I prepared the food, I took care of the house, the errands, washing, ironing, mending. I arrived at six in the morning and I left at 2:30, but three or four times a month, I stayed until nine o'clock, sometimes even until 10 o'clock. I got only two francs a month. I didn't quit my job until a month before my wedding.

Right after the wedding, the young couple tried their luck in Algiers but stayed there only a month ("I couldn't get used to the big city, I had never traveled") and then returned to Constantine, where we saw them taking in their young cousin Joël (p. 39). The husband worked as a carpenter in a workshop six days a week. September 1930 marks a turning point in their lives: he set up his own business, and the family moved to Batna. After one of his workers suffered an accident at work, the husband was the victim of a shady insurance agent and was blackmailed by the wounded worker.

The insurance agent was indicted, but we had everything else on our backs. K. [the worker ] was lazy and found a source of income: he started blackmailing my husband. Every time he came back, he asked for bigger and bigger sums. He knew he couldn't be punished, and he took advantage of it. My husband couldn't pay his bills anymore, for wood, hardware, everything he needed to run the workshop. He wasn't making ends meet anymore. There were two bailiffs in Batna who shared an office. One was French, Mr. G., and the other a Jew, Mr. K. [who was related to the worker involved in the litigation ]. When I would see him, he never wanted to help us, and when it was Mr. G., he

did all he could. In the end, we just couldn't manage anymore. We sold everything for whatever we could get, and we paid all our debts. We had nothing left. One morning, my husband insisted that I do the errands; when I came back, I understood why. I returned from the market to find the house empty; there was nothing more than the clothes in the suitcases and the dishes in boxes. The children were dressed, ready to leave. The night before, he had made the arrangements. At noon, we took the train for Constantine, two children, me pregnant, and a sick husband [he will be hospitalized and will recover slowly from a stomach ulcer ].

Return to the previous situation: in Constantine, the husband was employed as a foreman, one child died, another born. At the end of 1935, the family tried its luck once again in Algiers, where the husband was first employed as a simple apprentice. Once again, a Frenchman helps them out.

He had to find work. A carpenter had put a notice on his door that he was looking for an apprentice—he didn't want a worker. After both of us thought it over, he went back to work as an apprentice at seven francs a day. At least I could feed my children and pay the rent . . .

One day a candymaker named K. wanted to redo the front of his shop. He called my husband's boss. He took my husband with him, and he started working right away. It was urgent, he finished the front and the windows in the shop. He was very happy with my husband's work; he asked him to redo his apartment. [A long narrative follows: the candymaker discovers that the "apprentice" is underpaid, summons the boss and concludes after a long discussion ]: "You dare to make me pay a hundred francs a day for the worker—you even told me he was greedy and cost you a lot—when you're not even paying him for a week half of what I pay you for a day! Now I understood and you're going to pay him everything I paid you for him and I never want to hear from you again." He said to him: "And the work?" He answered: "As for the work, he'll finish it, and he'll be paid at the normal price."

Not only did he [the husband ] bring me a large sum of money that day but he finished the work for the candymaker. The other shops next door—when they saw the new shop front, they wanted to change their fronts too. There was an old tailor's shop, a glove maker, a shirtmaker. When all these shop fronts were finished, you couldn't recognize Rue d'Isly anymore. And ever since then, thank God, we never wanted for anything. He worked hard, of course, but he was happy.

1939: In Suzanne T.'s tale, the family chronicle once again encounters world history.

In June 1939, I gave birth to a daughter, Hermine. I named her Hermine because my husband had a Spanish worker who worked with him. He was called Henri and his wife was Hermine. We were very close to them, so if it had been a boy, we would have called him Henri. Since it was a girl, we called her Hermine. He was the caretaker of a big villa that belonged to a lawyer; the owners came once or twice a year, during the fruit season. On Saturday night, we went up to that house. We came back on Sunday night with vegetables, fruit, flowers. Every morning, he passed by our house on his way to work, so he'd bring me what his wife picked for herself and for us. So many flowers, I didn't know where to put them. And on September 1st my husband got a telephone call from the city hall of Bouzareah that he had to go to city hall with the leaders of the neighborhood. They all went by truck to the city hall, which was five miles away. The mayor and his deputies were waiting for them. The mayor announced the declaration of war. There were police there too. The chief of police gave each one of them a travel order and said they had to take the train at eight o'clock the next morning. The mayor gave them posters to put up in all the neighborhoods.

When they came back, I understood right away that something was wrong. My husband filled me in and everybody gathered in our house. Men and women were crying. We knew that everything was going to be terrible.

On September 2, it was a Friday morning, we had only 20

pennies in the house. He left me 10, and he took the rest. He didn't want me to go to the station with him. Later on, I wondered about how I was going to feed my children.

Suzanne goes to work in a clothing factory. At the end of the war, the family numbers eight children (a last son will be born in 1947), and the husband resumes his activities. Family happiness is at an all-time high: they build a big house, the bar mitzvah^[9] of one of the sons is celebrated with a great show of wealth, the family is able to entertain young Jewish soldiers every Friday night, the husband becomes one of the leaders of the Jewish community. He is even paid a visit by a French admiral: the photograph depicting this event shows them in a salon whose wide bay windows are shaped like the Star of David. The house really is the house of the Good Lord.

As for Tita, whom we saw escaping the surveillance of her jealous husband in Tunis, she began her life in poverty and continued in poverty.

My father? A shoemaker. He had a little shop, in the Hara, in front of the Italian woman who made chairs for children. A little shop. But his heart was a little cold, he didn't like work. God rest his soul. Leila, she worked; my poor mother, she worked. She worked in a hundred ways. She washed the women, she took them to the Turkish bath. She worked washing the dead. She washed clothes. She worked with all colors. God rest her soul.

. . . When I was little, we ate chicken only twice a year. At Purim and . . . when else?^[10] At Kippur. That's all. Here, you throw the chicken [she swears ], over my father's head, you throw it!

. . . Before, my mother went to the butcher and said: "Give me a few pieces of tripe and a little something for Friday's couscous." She only went there on Friday. Other days she didn't go there or he just gave her some skin. At home, she broiled it, she took off the hair, made it white as a lily, and then

[9] Religious ritual of a boy's coming of age.

[10] The holiday of Purim celebrates the victory of the Jews, subjects of King Ahaseurus, over the minister Haman who plotted to destroy them. The Jews were saved by the intervention of Esther and her uncle Mordechai.

you would serve that skin with chickpeas and cumin or with beans and cumin.

"How much did she buy, two pounds?"

Are you kidding! Maybe a half a pound, he gave her, a pound. Listen: with that, she made the couscous broth, meat balls, tfina [a dish slowly braised for Saturday ], and stew.

The father worked listlessly. The mother washed the living and the dead and did laundry. At this level of poverty, the daughter very soon had to contribute to the family resources: she took over the mother's domestic tasks and took in trimming work at home.

I worked at home. Arabic work, Arabic buttons, tassels. Something else: I did weaving. I worked on the floor, one ball of yarn on one side, one ball of yarn on the other side. And I worked in the house, I was responsible for the house. I washed the clothes, I cooked, I prepared Shabbat [Saturday, the day of rest ] . . . I went to bring water with the neighbors, everybody took a turn. In short, I worked, I worked, so much [sigh ].

The husband her mother made her marry because he was a hard worker was only a peddler of secondhand goods. In 1936 he rises to become an apartment agent but he dies before he can enjoy the fruits. Like her mother before her, Tita has to go to work for other people.

He worked hard. Every day. Could he stand not working? He would have died of it. Whenever he came home without earning any money, he was mad. Right away I understood. Oh boy, I was scared. He turned the whole house upside down if he didn't earn anything.

"What did he sell?"

Roba vecchia . [Taking up the cry uttered by that type of merchant ]: Roba vecchia! Scarbi vecchia!^[11] Bottle dealer. Then he stopped. He used to dress like an Arab, you know? He wore a chechia, a sweater, and a sarwal^[12] that could hold four people [laughs ]. Later on, he was partners with H. So H. told him: "Aouïda!" "What." "You know, we have to go to fancy houses, on Avenue

[11] Italian words in the local Tunisian spelling: used things, used shoes.

[12] Translator's note: Chechia is the red cap, and sarwal the wide trousers traditionally worn by natives in North Africa.

de Paris, in the arcade. You have to dress like an Italian. Because when you visit a house—houses for sale were written in newspaper ads—people are going to say: 'He's a Moslem.'" He answered: "Fine." That's how it happened. Right away, he went to the tailor, made a suit, one or two pairs of pants. And he changed over to a shirt and tie. I said to him: "Aouïda, look at you!" "What can I do? They laugh at me and I shouldn't change?" The poor man, that year, he died with it all. He left his things hanging in the wardrobe. New suit, underpants, shirts, ties, shoes, socks: Lalou his son took them for his bar mitsvah. That's God's will; what can I do?

[After his death. ] Somebody gave me this, somebody else gave me that, my brothers-in-law helped. Then they all stopped. So I went to Mchi'ad. God rest his soul, Mchi'ad. He said: "Tita!" "Yes!" "You want me to take you to work?" "I'd like it very much, Mchi'ad, I'm in such bad shape." So, he took me to work for a particular lady. I didn't earn a cent without tears running down my face as much as the water I was washing with. I had a very hard time.

Whenever life in the Hara comes into people's memories, several themes recur obsessively: small houses, crowded courtyards; small incomes; the luxury represented by the purchase of meat or poultry. These images are colored with contrasting tones. Those who have always lived in the ghetto talk about the cleanliness of "well-ordered" rooms; they recall an orderly world. The courtyard illustrates a sociability marked at times by boisterous laughter. Meals are tribute to the ingenuity of the maternal cuisine. Those who escaped from the ghetto or who never lived there, however, denounce the poverty, the crowding, the unfair disparity between rich and poor. Among many other memories, that of André A., born in Tunis in 1926:

I was born right in the middle of the Hara. We lived there until we were communion age, twelve, in 1938.^[13] Then we lived on Rue Pierre Curie, next to Avenue de Londres, down below. It's a more middle-class neighborhood: the bus went by, the streetcar, all that. There were cars . . .

[13] The narrator borrows the word communion from the colonial Christian population to evoke his bar mitzvah.

My grandfather, he never went to school. For forty years, he worked as a hairdresser; when he died he had never left Tunis, except once. He traveled forty miles to Testour, on a pilgrimage to Rabbi Fraji. That's the only time he left. There's a man who lived seventy years in poverty, in whadycallit. He never left. Except for La Goulette [a resort suburb of Tunis ]. And La Goulette, he went there maybe once a year, once every two years, because he didn't have any money. It was a big deal. That was the kind of life it was.

Meat, you ate it once a week, on Friday night. And m'alaq, not even l-marjou'a^{[ 14]} because it's less expensive. And I was the one who went to buy it at the butcher, with all those flies around.

Yvette A., cousin and sister-in-law of André A.:

X. tells that his mother, in order to encourage him when he went to school, told him: "If you're the best, I'll make you a hard-boiled egg on Saturday in the tfina." Okay, the first month that worked, he was the best, she made him his hard-boiled egg. The second month too. Then she said to him: "This won't do." Even one hard-boiled egg a month strained the budget.

The Religion of Our Fathers,
The Cooking of Our Mothers

Religious rituals stand out vividly in memory. Summoning up memories, everyone sees Shabbat, Purim, Passover, Yom Kippur, and other important dates. Everyone emphasizes the consistency of practices, their expected repetition. They describe not one celebration, dated and unique, but a holiday that is the sum total of all holidays, a Saturday that encompasses all Saturdays. Everyone also emphasizes the fullness of the celebrations: "everyone" participated in them, "all" the laws were observed, "everything" had to be done just right.^[15]

[14] M'alaq, top ribs, marjou'a, beef shank.

[15] The sequences of biography also follow the cycle of religious holidays, and individual life takes its rhythm from ritual in Camille El Baz, Sarah, ou moeurs et coutumes des Juifs de Constantine [Sarah, or the Ways and Customs ofthe Jews of Constantine] (Nice, 1971); and in Edmond Zeïtoun, Les Cadeaux de Pourim [Purim Presents] (Paris: La Pensée universelle, 1975).

One man, recalling Sefrou before the emigration of the Jews from Morocco:

Oh! The holidays! You had to live there. There just aren't enough words to describe the holidays in Sefrou for you. You felt the holidays in the house, you felt the holidays on the street. Shabbat, let's begin with Shabbat! There wasn't a single Jewish shop, a single store that was open. All the Jews were gathered in the mellah^[16] and were in the shuls .^[17] There were seventeen plus three, twenty shuls in that town. So you can imagine!. . . . You won't find it there anymore. Those who didn't live there can't ever experience the holiday the way we did. And every holiday had its own color, its own traditions.

Passover,^[18] that was the preparation of the wafers right after Purim because you didn't get the wafers ready-made in packages, like now. Every family, they had to buy their own wheat, select it, bring it to the mill—a mill that was koshered^[19] —made sure everything was kosher. Oh! The feeling on those occasions was really something indescribable. So Passover came, all the houses were gleaming, shining, cleaned up, whitewashed, painted. Some houses were painted although each family had only one room. Most families were big, when I say big, there were ten children. They all lived in one room and it wasn't

[16] Mellah designates the Jewish neighborhood in Moroccan cities.

[17] Shul : Synagogue. The word is borrowed from Yiddish, which indicates that, for the narrator, the Ashkenazi Jews represent a stricter Orthodoxy than the one he claims for his own community. It signals the hierarchies prevailing in France or at least the way they are perceived.

[18] Passover, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. The following holidays are then recalled:

1. Purim, see p. 54. The Book of Esther is called a megillah, which will be used later (p. 60);

2. Sukkot, the Feast of the Tabernacles, which takes place in autumn;

3. Hanukkah, which celebrates the reconsecration of the Temple by the Hasmoneans in the second century B.C.E. The hanukia (also see p. 59) is the candelabra used during the eight-day holiday, with one additional branch lit each night.

[19] Kashrut, the combination of rules of dietary purity. Kosher, fit for consumption. To kosher, to make something fit for consumption.

always large. I ask myself . . . How did those people manage? And yet they lived, they were happy, that's how it was.

On Sukkoth you saw huts everywhere. There wasn't a street that didn't have huts; there wasn't a house, if it had a courtyard, that didn't have a hut.

Weeks before Hanukkah, they were already beginning to prepare olive oil to light the hanukiya . For each holiday, and I tell you that in practice they couldn't even imagine what assimilation was or how there could be a Jew who didn't keep the Shabbat. I don't mean all Jews were pious and observant. There were some in the Jewish population of Sefrou who weren't very pious, very observant. But what does it mean to say very observant? It means somebody who doesn't observe to the letter what he is told. But you couldn't imagine a Jew who didn't go to shul three times, for shaharit, minhah, and maariv,^[20] that just didn't exist. Or an artisan, a hairdresser who opened his shop on Shabbat—that just didn't come into our heads. Or a businessman tempted by profit and opening his shop on Saturday—that just couldn't be.

Manou B., Aïn Beïda, 1926, speaking of Constantine in the 1930s:

For the holidays, it was marvelous, for our own holidays, because we felt them. Saturday, we felt it because we lived in the ghetto and Saturday, everybody made Saturday. For holidays, everybody was dressed for the holiday. That was the way it was. That's what we don't have here anymore.

Camilla N., Tripoli, about 1900:

My father was a real believer. He prayed every morning and on the holidays. When it was a holiday, for instance, it was a holiday, it was a religious thing, it was a holiday. For instance, on Friday night, I can't tell you how that table was: the flowers, the candlesticks, the prayers. . . . Not so much the prayers, it was everything. He said the prayer, the blessing over all the children, we kissed his hand, there, that's how it was.

[20] The three daily prayers that must be said, respectively, at dawn, at sunset, and in the evening.

And the maids! In the morning, there was a bath for us upstairs. Then, downstairs, on the ground floor, that was where they washed the clothes, a kind of laundry where the maids went when they had made the couscous and everything else. And all of them dressed up special with henna and everything. And then they put on silk, they were dressed, all of them. And then, until Saturday night, they didn't touch anything.

Each celebration had a corresponding act, gesture, a libretto in which everyone had a role to play. Children, for example: Purim in Bizerte at the end of the last century:

So, what did my brother Ernest do? We got the catalog from the Samaritan department store and there were women and men in the catalog. He unfolded them, put them on a cardboard and when my grandfather read the megillah to us, because he had to read it to us aloud, when the name of Haman was uttered, we sang and hit the pictures with little rattles they sold for the occasion. It was very picturesque! [Mathilde B., Bizerte, 1892.]

Tripoli at the beginning of the century. The destruction of the Temple was commemorated on the ninth of Ab. In the book of Ezekiel, the prophecies against the people of Israel and on the ruin of Jerusalem are followed by the "resurrection of the people of God" and the rebuilding of the City. Then there is the vision of the dry bones restored to life: "The hand of the Lord was upon me and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones. . . . Then He said unto me: Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel." Camilla never studied this book because girls only learnt practical things and not traditional texts. But she unwittingly acted out Ezekiel's vision. She recalls her childhood gestures, and something of their meaning has remained engraved in her memory: to collect the pearls was to reassemble the bodies of the Jews. She had acted out the rebuilding of the "house of Israel," prepared for God's return to His people. All that is left of the awesome biblical prophecy are these little pearls:

Many beliefs were attractive because they weren't fanatical. For example, one of the things that was very moving was when there was—what do they call it?—the destruction of the Tem-

ple. Again,^[21] that's it. For again, for example, everybody fasted and for the children they bought us a lot of little pearls, you know, tiny little pearls. With those little pearls, I could make a little fish. It was to collect the bones of all the Jews who were killed and scattered. That was for that holiday.

The festival, the toilette, the clothing transform even the humblest persons. In Tripoli again, "the maids" put henna on their hair and dressed in silk gowns for Shabbat. Here is Aunt Bergana, a servant during the week, in the glory of Friday night.

On Friday night, we had an old aunt of my father's who was a sort of household drudge and who was always at home. All week long, she was in the kitchen, you know, like all Jewish women, like all women. She took care of this one and that one, and, naturally, everybody loved her a lot, but she was like a piece of furniture, an old piece of furniture. So what was special is that this aunt that you almost didn't see, who came to the table, who sat in a corner—on Friday night, she put kohl^[22] on her eyes out to here, she put on her nicest barracano,^[23] she made herself all beautiful. And when they said the prayer, she stood up for the prayer. And I always remember my cousins coming from England, Cairo, London; they were very rich and so very advanced in their ways, very snobbish and everything. There was one cousin who was there one Friday night, as they were saying the prayer. And he sees tsia Bergana. "Tsia Bergana, tsia Bergana, look, what happened to her? She's so tall!" He had always seen her sitting down. And here was a woman who was tall, with big black eyes, who was standing up.

For the end of Shabbat, which marks the return to secular life and produces a kind of pang of anxiety, "a bad mood," the father officiated. He recited the havdalah prayer,^[24] and with that the old aunt resumed her humble position:

[21] Again : the ninth of Ab—Ab is a month in the Jewish calendar that corresponds approximately to the month of August—is the annual commemoration of the destruction of the Temple.

[22] Kohl, eye makeup.

[23] Barracano, a woolen garment in which women wrapped themselves.

[24] Havdalah: prayer of separation that ends the Sabbath repose and ushers in ordinary life again.

So, on Saturday night, it was funny, you known, on Saturday night, papa said the prayer and Saturday was over and so you saw that woman start laughing giddily, hee-hee-hee, hee-hee-hee, until the whole family caught that contagious laughter. Why? Because they said that if you start laughing on Saturday night and you're happy, the whole week is happy, so in families there's always a little bit of a bad mood, a little . . . something—it's like that in every family. And that woman, as soon as she saw there was a bad mood, she started her ridiculous laughing, like a clown. She knew she would set them all off . . .

Noises, sounds, voices also return to memory. Tripoli again, at the beginning of the century: Camilla N. recalls the holiday of Shavuot, which commemorates the giving of the Tablets of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. But this is not what her tale is about. What remains is rather a night of vigil and the whispering of the rabbis who "talmodize."

Then the Tomotoura^[25] came to the house, and it was a real wonder, because all night long there was the rabbis and the children who came to pray and especially to argue, they argued the whole Talmud, they argued all night, they argued and they argued. But, by five o'clock in the morning, we went to bed, we were young and it was so nice, those kids' voices, you know. And so, all night long, there were maids serving coffee, bringing them cakes, bringing them things, coming and going. We stayed downstairs a little bit and then we got bored hearing them talmodizing,^[26] arguing and everything. But at five o'clock in the morning, they had special songs and there, that's just the way it was. It was really a strict form of religion but it wasn't oppressive because it came in that way—there wasn't any fanaticism at all, not at all.

To speak of religion, then, is not to recall a faith, beliefs, or study but rather to evoke shared acts, forms of fellowship and of sociability.

[25] Tamotoura [Talmud Torah]: children studying the Torah. The locution is condensed into one word and indicates children who only attended rabbinic school, i.e., the poor.

[26] The narrator invents the word talmodize, shaped on psalmodize.

When faith disappeared, gestures remained. At its extreme, religion became practice without knowledge, an orthopraxis without orthodoxy.

Repeated, one seeming just like the next, the holidays are ultimately confused in memory because their meaning has been lost or never was really grasped in the first place.

Gabriel D. (Salonika, about 1910) is unsure of the order of the holidays and then resumes:

Once Shavuot is over, then came New Year's Day . . . New Year's Day before Kippur . . . First was Yom Kippur, then it was New Year's Day, I think. Or first it was New Year's Day and then Yom Kippur, I think so, yes.

Laure A. again, about her father:

In synagogue, for example, on Kippur and on the Day of Atonement, my grandmother said to him: "Jacques, everybody has already come out of church [sic ]." "I'm waiting for them to go. Because they haven't eaten, their breath, I can't stand it." "So, come on, it's already late." He went, unwillingly. Then, on the Day of Atonement, he went.

"The Day of Atonement is Kippur, isn't it?"

"No, the Day of Atonement isn't Kippur! Kippur is the fast. The Day of Atonement comes a week later."

It takes a long discussion, interspersed with laughter and exclamations to finally establish the order of the holidays.

Women's participation in rituals was exercised primarily in the kitchen. The image of the ritual blends with that of the table, a masterpiece created by the mother and offered to her kin, a center around which the family circle was linked, and an altar of the family's religion.

Manou B., Aïn Beïda, 1926:

My husband was strict. On Friday, it was special, holidays were special, and I keep it up here. I can guarantee you that on Friday night in my house, there's a table, a beautiful Friday night table. Friday night in my house is very beautiful. You see here, it's all full. It's a beautiful Shabbat table.

The women recall less what they did than what they had to do: prepare a meal. If you think about it, that's what they devoted themselves to every single day. Why did the preparation of holiday meals leave such a strong impression? No doubt because these occasions gathered the "whole" family and demanded more effort, more dishes, more utensils. Some celebrations were also accompanied by unusual acts laden with significance: the preparation of the Passover dishes, the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, the sacrifice of the chickens on Yom Kippur. But those meals, more than the daily routine, had particularly to conform to the norms. No initiative, no improvisation, no delay was permitted. You had to bend to the rules, prove that you had internalized them. Cooking was basically the female expression of orthodoxy since women did not go to the synagogue—and when they did it was as spectators. Hence, the preparation of food constituted the feminine part of each holiday and the first act of the libretto that the whole family was going to perform. Men came on stage only after the ovens were cold.

The paradox, then, is that Yom Kippur, a day of contrition, of withdrawal, remains in memories as a moment of culinary fever.^[27]Yom Kippur is associated with tastes: of stuffed chicken, lemonade, and cookies for the Jews of Tunis; of chicken with tomato sauce in Salonika. The association of food and ritual is so close in memory that a woman born in Algeria, wanting to talk about her estrangement from religion, recalls her fears when she stopped eating on Yom Kippur for the first time .

The first year I didn't eat on Kippur, I said to myself: "Is it true that something bad is going to happen to me next year?" In Algeria, the boys had to go to Hebrew religious school, while we didn't have any. . . . You weren't good for anything but making meatballs [to go with the Shabbat couscous ] and knowing what dish to make for what holiday. [Paule S., Tlemcen, born in 1940. ]

The thousand and one ways of making chicken for Yom Kippur finally casts doubt on the religious practice: that is the experience of

[27] A literary echo of this fever of preparation for the fast is in Katia Rubinstein, Mémoire illettrée d'une fillette d'Afrique du Nord à l'époque coloniale [Illiterate Memoir of a North African Girl During the Colonial Period] (Paris: Stock, 1979).

Ida O., who sees in the diversity of Jewish food practices the proof that it is people who make the laws. Surely God would not have wasted His time inventing such prescriptions.

On the Day of Atonement, I don't eat. I do what I can but I don't want it to go any further because I think . . . I don't know . . . I'm going to explain these ideas of mine to you: I myself used to play a whole lot of poker, I visited a whole lot of people, and one of my friends was an Alsatian woman, from Alsace. She was born in China, but she was really French. Then I had a certain Madame C., a high-class Moroccan, if you please, surely no pied-noir .^[28] We played a whole lot of poker, we were at the table, playing. Okay, next week was the Day of Atonement. So we asked what do you plan to do? Our custom—and this I still observe—was first that we fasted and all that. My father went to the synagogue. And at night, we started with a spoonful of jam with coffee, and some soup. My parents always made chicken, chicken cooked in tomato sauce. That was the custom of Salonika. You made broth, you left it in to make a soup with noodles. And the rest of the chicken you cooked in tomato sauce. That stayed with me, that habit. So my friends asked: "What are you making to eat for Kippur?" I say: "We make soup and then chicken." "How awful! We make couscous!" The other one who was Polish: "I do this." [She :] "Do you think that the Good Lord had time to tell you 'Do this' if you're Polish; 'you pied-noirs, you do this,' You believe that? It's people who make the laws in every country. The Good Lord didn't have time to do that. In every country, the Shkenazis have one way of doing things and we Sephardim have another way." And maybe that's why my father kept a certain distance, you know, while believing, while being a Jew.

Among women, the memory of the tension brought on by the holidays sometimes leaves a bitter taste and leads them to criticize religious prescriptions and taboos. In Istanbul, Laure A.'s mother fell ill at Passover. Mathilde (Bizerte, 1892), speaking of her brother-in-law, a "very religious" man, goes on:

[28] Pied-noir : the European settlers in colonial Algeria and their descendants.

You see, he saw only one thing, his religion. So there was no way to talk to him, you couldn't get him to the theater. He prayed. On Saturday, he prayed all day long and it was pure agony. You know how it was, on Friday, you had to run to do the cooking because at four o'clock, the candles were lit and all the rest. It was murder! Moses, he was very pious, very . . .

"And you did that yourself?"

Me, no. My sister, yes. My sister suffered that agony. It's an agony, eh, because you've got to rush so. Fortunately, she had help; there were always servants who helped her with the heavy work, and she did the cooking.

And she took her bath every month. When she had her period, she slept in another bed. So, it meant fifteen days with the husband and fourteen days without coming close to him. It was her mother-in-law who kept count! Yes, she would say to her: "Tonight, I calculated, today, you go to the Turkish bath." And that day, she had to go to the Turkish bath in order to sleep with her husband. So, for the first fourteen days, she slept with her husband, then it stopped.

If religious practice is located between the kitchen and the holiday table for women, men more often recall the synagogue. The memories of Henri Z., born in Cairo in 1913, show clearly that this difference corresponds to a real division of tasks:

We did Passover, Kippur, of course . . . Passover and Kippur . . . Naturally, my mother had an open table. But that was every night. And on the holidays, there were naturally twenty, thirty, forty people. Especially during the war, the war of '40, every day at lunch or dinner, she had fifteen or twenty soldiers or officers.

"OK. That's the meal. But the ritual as such, who did that?"

That was my father, though my mother also knew them. My father read Hebrew. Badly, but he read it, maybe in his own way.

The mother shared her table; the father read Hebrew. For Gabriel D. (Salonika, about 1910), ritual meant going to the synagogue:

On Yom Kippur, everybody went to the synagogue because, in Salonika at that time, there were almost seventy or eighty thousand, so . . .^[29]

There were a good many synagogues. I can't list them all for you. When I was little and my father took me to synagogue, that synagogue was in the central marketplace of Salonika. I went there . . . and then to another one they built later, in some street. What was the name of that synagogue? And then there was the big synagogue of Beth Shaul, I don't know if you've heard of it. That synagogue of Beth Shaul existed during the time of Jesus Christ! I was married in that synagogue in 1937.

Religion is also a questioning, sometimes a doubt. M. M. (Sousse, 1900) was bar mitzvah, he learned to read Hebrew, but he doesn't understand it. Speaking of Jews (after indicating his family origins), he goes on:

That race which has lasted for five thousand years, there must be a reason for it. . . . If I were to tell you my views, you wouldn't believe me [laughs ].

"Tell me anyway."

[29] Salonika numbered 120,000 inhabitants at the turn of the century. With about 50,000 individuals in 1901, 90,000 in 1908, the Jewish community was the most important in the city, which also included communities of Moslems, Greeks, Bulgarians, and a few thousand people of other nationalities. See Paul Dumont, "La structure sociale de la communauté juive de Salonique à la fin du XIX siècle" [The Social Structure of the Jewish Community of Salonika at the End of the Nineteenth Century] Revue historique 263:2 (1980): 351–393.

Only the Jews of Salonika recall the numerical—hence social—importance of their community as a claim to glory. Note that the Jewish population of Turkey was estimated at about 300,000 inhabitants at the turn of the century, before the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the begining of Jewish emigration. M. Franco, Essai sur l'histoire des Israélites de l'Empire ottoman depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours [Essay on the History of the Israelites of the Ottoman Empire from the Origins to Our Own Day] (Paris, 1897).

In Egypt, there were about 65,000 Jews in 1950 of a total population of 20 million; in Tunisia, more than 100,000 at the end of the Protectorate, most of them living in Tunis. In Morocco, the Jewish community numbered about 250,000 individuals at the end of the Protectorate, that is, 2.3 percent of the total population. Their proportion was less in Algeria (about 110,000 Jews in the 1940s and 1950s). See D. Bensimon-Donath, Evolution du judaïsme marocain sous le protectorat français, 1912–1956 [Evolution of Moroccan Judaism Under the French Protectorate, 1912–1956] (Paris: La Haye, Mouton, 1968).

Maybe Jesus really was the prophet sent by God. It's to punish us for burning him, for killing him, that we are . . . [he doesn't finish his sentence but he wants to evoke the misfortune of the Jews ]. Because, because, you surely read: the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, my boy, they were Christians. We refused to admit it, but you know, we've paid dearly for it! [Then, after a digression ]: You know, aside from a few fanatics, there aren't many [Jews ] anymore. The religion of our milieu's is extremely simplified. There isn't that fanaticism anymore, that pride in saying: "I'm a Jew."

"Were you observant in Tunisia?"

When I was young, yes, because I came from a very religious family. Now, on Kippur, Passover, more out of tradition than anything else. Now, I question. As soon as you question, you're not a believer anymore.

Sometimes the testimony goes off into a criticism of religious taboos, sometimes it expresses a doubt about the divine presence, sometimes it questions the meaning and validity of tradition. Finally, some people, objecting to fanaticism, indiscriminately reject the whole constellation of practices. Contrary to what might have been expected, it is not by virtue of adherence to the letter of religion that all these individuals assume their Jewish identity but much more through the sense of belonging to a local community and to a local tradition and through the experience of a combination of social practices that are recalled as having been shared only with Jews.

2—
Between the Order and the Dniepr

Yiddishland, of so many lost worlds, is different from all the others. It was not the inexorable course of time that carried it off—it was murdered, victim of a genocide unparalleled in history. Thus, a world lost several times over for Jews of eastern Europe: first, when they emigrated, for the most part, with no idea of going back; then, when it disappeared totally, millions of human beings gone up in smoke. This is why the nostalgia for childhood in the voices of the witnesses we are going to hear is not the nostalgia for any childhood: restrospectively, their memories bear the imprint of that tragic end. They feel not only a regret for a bygone past that formed their identities, but their memories are also mixed with complex, sometimes contradictory, feelings and reactions: tenderness, of course, at a return to their most private selves but also lucidity, even a critical spirit, as well as a sense of moral obligation. For if they know that they have lived an experience that cannot practically be transmitted, they also feel, as survivors, a manifest duty to make their testimony known .

Speaking of themselves, they also speak for the others, for those who cannot speak anymore. Memories intersect, echo, correct one another. What we hear are shared, multiple memories and memories of memories: people tell what was told by parents and grandparents, everyone they knew and loved, those who made them what they are. Long digressions and parentheses within parentheses follow the sometimes strange windings of recall: one must remember such and such a character, an episode, a scene, a dialogue, simply for themselves, for the simple reason that they existed. The expansion of memory responds to a concern for exhaustiveness, an effort to achieve a total reconstruction of

the past, analogous to the collective enterprise of the Yisker-biher (the "books of memory"), whose many pages bear rows of quotes, lists, inventories, so as not to lose anything of what once was. A duty of piety and loyalty, an obsessive concern not to forget anything: individual memories, like the "books of memory," are so many tombstones for the world of yesterday. In speaking of himself or herself, the individual erects a living memorial to those who are gone.

The Shtetl

The shtetl, the Jewish or predominantly Jewish village, was the space where people lived, among their own and felt at home. More important, in literature and folklore the shtetl meant a way of life, a combination of values that gave "its mark to Ashkenazi Jewry."^[1]The reality of the shtetl, however, was more complex, less idyllic than is projected by the somewhat sublimated image. Its representations in memories are not without nuances: the warmth of human relations, the outstanding moral qualities, combined with religious or political contradictions and extreme poverty.

Charles H., born in 1906 in Nysko, in western Galicia, comes from families that illustrate the diversity of the shtetlach: on his father's side, the rationalist tradition of the Haskalah,^[2]along with an opening onto the wide spaces (with the rafts of wood that went floating down the San and the Vistula to the Danube); on his mother's side, a life of peasants of Hasidic stock who nevertheless harbored a certain fascination with the prestige of the Polish nobility .

My paternal grandfather died young, about forty, before I was born. He had a very special trade: he was a Danziger soyher,^[3] that is, he cut down forests (there were immense forests in the region). They took the wood to the river, the San, and made wooden rafts, just as they do everywhere in that flat country. Having made his raft, he went down the San, then the Vistula,

[1] Rachel Ertel, Le Shtetl. La bourgade juive de Pologne [The Shtetl. The Jewish Village of Poland] (Paris: Payot, 1982), 16–17.

[2] Enlightenment movement, an opening up to the modern world, which emerged in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century and spread to eastern Europe during the nineteenth century.

[3] Soyher —merchant (from the Hebrew sokher ).

to Danzig. He built a cabin on that raft and it served as a house for him to live in. In Danzig, the wood was sold for use in the mines of England (they were pine forests). The expedition took place in March or April, as soon as the snow melted and the water was rising. It was important to calculate the date carefully, it went very fast. It all had to be done before the river overflowed. Either he returned rich after an expedition like that (he returned by train), or he returned poor, if the wooden raft ran aground on the banks. From time to time, he had to ask the Jewish community in which he found himself to help him get back, and he returned destitute, absolutely destitute.

[ . . .] I knew my maternal grandfather very well. He was another type. My mother came from a little village, a real village, where there were a half dozen Jews, a classic village. So, my grandfather was a peasant, a rarity among Galician Jews. I still remember my grandfather behind the plow. He was the owner of a little farm, maybe fifteen morgen, which corresponds roughly to three-fourths of a hectare. It was rather strange because my mother's village belonged to a count. It was still very feudal: I saw my grandfather go to Hrabia^[4] Horodjinski to kiss his hand. Everything belonged to him. The peasants and my grandfather had little patches of ground. My grandfather's farm wasn't his own property either; it belong to Horodjinski. He cultivated five or six hectares that he rented from the count (aside from his patch of land). But the horses, the cows, etc., were his.

There was a large building, a hunting lodge, which my grandfather rented and managed; he had prepared some rooms and he also made a restaurant and tavern. I think the count could sell alcohol. They accused the Jews of causing drunkenness—they ran the taverns after all—but the actual owners were the count or the priest. My grandfather wasn't rich, he worked as a manager. Even today, I still see grandfather wearing a long frock coat and that frock coat floating in the wind and him behind the horse that pulled the plow.

But he was influenced by the count, by the life of the nobility.

[4] Count.

So my grandfather played his Horodjinski. He had a beard in the style of Franz Josef. Tall, strong, with broad shoulders, a good appetite. For several months, in about 1910, an artisan had come to live in my grandfather's house to make him his pretty little carriage, his bryczka (with two wheels). I still remember my grandfather driving us in autumn before the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to a branch of the San. He rented that branch of the river for fishing. We went by boat from the other side and held long lines. We went out fishing at four in the morning. We would fill cases, barrels full of fish, put them in the bryczka, and then go to sell them in town, in Rozwadow, some six miles away. On the eve of the Jewish holidays, we always did a good business.

We also brought fish back home for grandmother to fry on the stove. She breaded them with flour and then salted them, and we filled barrels with them. They used them in the inn and we ate them in the winter; it was good to crunch them.

So, grandfather played a bit of the count; he imitated him. In his building, at home, he had set up one room like a kind of synagogue. That is, he bought a Torah^[5] —that was expensive—with a little closet. There were a few Jews in the area, peasants like him, in the little villages around the castle. And on Saturday, since there was no synagogue in the little villages and since you need ten men to say prayers, they came from all the villages to pray in grandfather's house. He was the host. After prayers, he offered everyone a glass of vodka.

There's the character. Religiously speaking, he wasn't very well versed in Talmud. But for the holidays, he also played the Hasid, he had his tsaddik, a somewhat miraculous rabbi. A big court with a lot of people. And, since he played the count, he brought a lot of money. When he came, they greeted him: "Rebbe Herschel!" and they sat him on the right of the tsaddik, he had the privilege of receiving the first piece of meat when the tsaddik distributed it, and he was very proud of that. He probably went there for the holiday of Sukkot because, for

[5] This expression already appears very secularized, for the traditional formula was: "had a Torah inscribed."

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I think he stayed home. But I know that it must have been expensive. Since he had a lot of daughters, when there was a girl to marry off, grandmother came to ask my father (her son-in-law), who had influence over him, to find a way to keep him from going to the tsaddik that year because they had to have enough for their daughter's dowry!

My grandfather had a lot of respect for my father because my father was a learned man; he gave him a gift of an edition of the Babylonian Talmud in at least twenty volumes, bound in leather.

Here is another vision of the shtetl, fleeting but dazzling. Isaac P. was born in Kiev at the end of the last century. He spent his early childhood in the big city, which he left in 1904, at the age of seven, after the pogrom of Kishinev, to hide with his mother in the village where his grandparents lived.

At the time of the pogrom, my father got the idea of sending us to his shtetl. He sent my mother, the children, all we could carry; we made the trip by boat on the Dniepr, to B. [ . . .] The village was divided into two completely distinct parts, separated by a little river. On one side were the Jews and on the other, the goys; on one side the synagogue all black, on the other a church all white. To go from one part to the other, there was a footbridge. But nobody (at least not the children) ever crossed the footbridge.

In the shtetl, it was Jewish life par excellence. In Kiev, even in the Jewish schools, you learned Russian. In the shtetl, you spoke only Yiddish and everything was Jewish: language, clothes, customs, way of life. You recognized a Jew a hundred feet away, with his black hat, his long frock coat, usually black, all buttoned up. In the shtetl, it was a total Jewish life, with Shabbat and the holidays, a Jewish life as it was conceived at that time, in that place, but total. You couldn't be anything else. It wasn't thinkable. When there was a holiday, there was a holiday all over. A fast, everybody fasted. It was the Kingdom of God, in its way.

The shtetlach lasted for centuries and centuries by preserving a spirit. In a different form, I find that spirit inside me, attenuated, but very deep. Those shtetlach were separate little kingdoms, which had established a spiritual permanence in the midst of precariousness. They were so many little Jerusalems. Every one of those shtetlach was a little Jerusalem.

On the contrary, the tale of Georges F. (born in 1915) lingers on the desolation, the archaic aspects, and the poverty of the Jewish town. The town is Skarzysko, between Radom and Kielce:

It's a village that was truly primitive. At the age of six or seven, I saw that they walked like it was still two hundred years ago. Now, with hindsight, I see that it really was a primitive state. They walked barefoot. There weren't any sidewalks, nor a paved road in the middle. Naturally, there wasn't much traffic [laughs ]. You were almost mixed up with the animals. It wasn't organized, that's how it was, savage. I always went barefoot in summer. During the war of '14, when the Russians chased the Germans, they put tree trunks across the paths to be able to move their vehicles. That's what allowed us to cross from one house to another avoiding the mud. Afterward, it improved. They became aware that life isn't exactly like that, and they started to put in sidewalks, roads.

When I was little, there was real poverty. The Jews were the tradesmen. You lived on nothing. This one sold apples he bought from the peasants; that one sold potatoes. My mother sold poultry. She used to get two or three chickens to sell to people who were a little better off. That's how she was able to feed her children. We lived in a house built of logs. There weren't any roof tiles, nothing at all; the roof was also made of wooden boards. We didn't have electricity either. It did exist in the village a little farther away, but we didn't get it until I was sixteen or eighteen years old. Until then, I didn't see a light; we always used kerosene lamps, like in the old days. It was still archaic, a little primitive. There were wells. We went to get water with buckets.

The City

The shtetl wasn't the only place where the Jews of eastern Europe felt at home among themselves. Statistically speaking, in Poland between the wars the Jewish minority represented 10 percent of the population (3.2 million out of 32 million inhabitants, according to the statistics of 1931). However, its distribution was geographically imbalanced. A third of the population in cities like Warsaw (352,000 out of 1,171,000), Lodz (202,000 out of 604,000), Lvov (99, 000 out of 312,000), or Lublin (38,000 out of 112,000) was Jewish.^[6]In those areas of heavy concentration, the Jewish community, despite its extreme diversity, imposed its structure and rhythm on daily life. While the city did not include a ghetto in the narrow juridical sense of the term, the Jews generally lived in neighborhoods where, as in the shtetl, they were among themselves. Following a suggestive formula of one of our informers: "There was no wall; the wall was only spiritual." One could spend years, even a whole lifetime, without venturing into non-Jewish neighborhoods, without mixing with "the others" (except through the concierge or, in the rarer case of well-off families, through servants). Thus, the number of Jews, the relative homogeneity, and the web of relations result, in the memory of the city as in the shtetl, in the same image of completeness, of a world that was totally Jewish.

Hélène H., born in 1906 in Bialystok, descendant of a line of famous rabbis, emphasizes the contrast between the two parts of the city. At the beginning of the century, the city numbered 42,000 inhabitants, 28,000 of them Jews (i.e., 66 percent):^[7]the Polish quarter stretched over vast spaces, residential and empty, where one never dared to go; whereas commercial activities, movement, and bustle were concentrated in the central Jewish streets, teeming with life.

[6] Pawel Korzec, Juifs en Pologne: La question juive pendent l'entre-deux-guerres [Jews in Poland: The Jewish Question Between the Wars] (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1980), 164; La Situation des Juifs dans le monde [The Situation of the Jews in the World], published by the World Jewish Congress, Vol. I, Part 1 (Paris, 1938), 208–217.

[7] The Bialystoker Memorial Book, ed. The Bialystoker Center (New York: 1982), 4. The figures mentioned by Hélène H. represent those of the 1930s.

I was born in Bialystok, one of the biggest cities of Poland. The Jews were two-thirds of the population; seventy thousand Jews out of a hundred thousand inhabitants.

There was a main street, Linden Street, which went from the station to the spacious quarter down below, where there was a public park. Almost in the middle, the street widened, you know, like in Cracow. There was a kind of square with a little clock. On every side you had perpendicular streets and we lived there, a street that wasn't very wide (hardly wider than Rue de Tolbiac), but very commercial. All the trade was concentrated in the main part, and it was all Jewish trade. You could go in and speak Yiddish in all the shops; that was completely normal. I don't remember seeing any Polish shops there (except later on, when I returned for vacation in the '20s and '30s). Then, a little farther on, the main street was cut by a street that was a little wider, more residential and less commercial. There were bigger, maybe richer houses. My grandfather (the rabbi) lived on that more spacious street. There, that was the Jewish city, all that.

Beyond, in the extension of Linden Street, if you like, you came to a more spacious neighborhood, where there was the public park, the administration buildings, the state high school, and maybe the theater. That was the Christian part. And we practically never went there. We lived in the main part of the city, the Jewish part. I tell you, the Christian part, that wasn't our city.

[ . . .] That wasn't exactly Poland, it was the part of Poland that was Russian-Lithuanian. I really didn't know anything about the Polish except that we had a maid named Zoche, who was Polish. That's all. For me, the Poles were the maid. Nobody in our house spoke Polish until the '20s.

"But in the Polish part of the city?"

I don't know what was there. We never went there!

Here is the description of a house in Kalisz, a city of about sixty thousand inhabitants, almost half of whom were Jews.^[8]Lazare M.'s

[8] The Kalish Book, ed. I. M. Lask (Tel Aviv: The Societies of Former Residents of Kalish and the Vicinity in Israel and the U.S.A., 1968), 10.

memories revive from inside (from attic to cellar) the neighborly, friendly, and family relations among those who lived there.

The Jewish quarter wasn't a compulsory ghetto. There was no wall; the wall was only spiritual. Everybody spoke Yiddish, even the concierges. In the Jewish streets, in the Jewish neighborhoods, it was rare to find a non-Jewish resident or tenant, except for the concierges. You needed a non-Jewish concierge for Saturdays, to light the lamp or, in winter, for the fire. He would come on Sundays, and you gave him ten groschen and a piece of challah .^[9] It was part of his salary. Because the concierge was even poorer than the poorest ones in the building. I remember, I can tell you, everybody who lived in our house.

It was like this. There was a wooden gate and then a courtyard and the house. With most of the houses in the poor neighborhoods, you entered, and there was the courtyard and then the house. There were also houses that fronted onto the street, with another house in back. In the big cities, in Warsaw, there were three or four courtyards, and then you came out into another street.

Our house had three stories, and with the cellar and the ground floor, that makes five floors of dwellings. There were three apartments per floor on four stories. One apartment of two rooms and kitchen and two apartments of one room and kitchen, the kitchen without a window, without light, and the room being the extension of the kitchen, twenty-five square meters in all.

Underground, let's say the cellar, because the windows were above, at ground level, that's how it was. On the left, in the apartment with two rooms and kitchen, lived a shoemaker. I still see him, with his one son and six daughters. The son was the oldest. On the right, in the apartment with one room and kitchen, it was your grandmother, Madame W., with five or six children, I don't remember. Your grandfather wasn't there anymore. The children were still little, three boys and two girls, I think. The oldest sons didn't live there anymore and your

[9] Braided egg bread eaten on the Sabbath and holidays.

grandmother worked making shirts. All that in a room fifteen by fifteen feet large, as in our house. Next to the W.'s was someone who practiced a trade that doesn't exist anymore, with pans: a tinsmith.

So, that was on the bottom. On the ground floor, that is, on the mezzanine, there was somebody who had a shop, a little shop. A haberdasher, a worker who made hats, with two daughters. He worked at home for a boss. And another one was a peddler. A peddler, that doesn't mean like here; there, they spread it out on the ground, on a piece of cloth, or they brought two or three chairs and put the merchandise on a chair. He did business in the little towns around Kalisz. He used to leave at midnight with a cart and horse to make his rounds.

On the first floor, my uncle was the one who lived in the two rooms and kitchen. He was a melamed, you know, a teacher; one room in his apartment was for his heder.^[10] We lived next door, in one room, my father, my mother, and three children, that is, my brother, my sister, and me. My father was a lace worker; it's the local industry of Kalisz. Most of the manufacturers and workers in lace were Jews. They sold it everywhere, in all of Russia, even in Siberia. Next door to us, in the other room and kitchen, lived the Diaments. One of the children was my friend. His older brother was a great hero in the Warsaw Ghetto: Abraham Diament. He had been a noncommissioned officer in the Polish army in 1920, a sergeant or, rather, a corporal because they called him "the corporal." And since he knew how to handle weapons, he had a rifle in the ghetto. Who had weapons in the ghetto? You know it wasn't everybody who had them. And he fell with a rifle in his hand, he fell from a roof of a burning house. I wrote an article about him, it's called Gestalten, "Faces of the Ghetto"; it hasn't been published yet. He lived right next door to me. His father worked in the city mill, at night, a night watchman; that's not a Jewish trade. And his mother was a teacher. She taught girls to read and write, Yiddish and Polish—because the girls didn't go to heder. She taught two or three girls, every day another class, all that in

[10] Traditional Jewish elementary school.

the one room. The room was smaller than this one and not so light. There was no bathroom either, just a garbage can and the kitchen without a window.

On the second floor, oh! On the second floor, the two apartments of one room and kitchen were joined into one. It wasn't actually an apartment. I'll tell you in Hebrew: it is called haknasat orhim ;^[11] it was to take in the poor to sleep. A night's shelter. I know it well because I went there often. At one time, it was my father who took care of it. It was an association, maybe the Jewish community, that paid my father a little something to open it at night. You had to register in a book because the police checked. The poor came there to sleep. It was dirty, because who was it who came? Beggars, Jewish beggars, schnorrers ! But not the beggars of Kalisz. Because begging is a trade, not just a trade, a caste. The ones who came were the beggars who made the rounds from one city to another, from one village to another. Let's say, one night, somebody comes that night and afterward he does twenty or thirty villages before he comes back to Kalisz. That was in '20, '22. I was ten, twelve years old. I was already somewhat aware of these things. I remember saying: "Papa, you'll see, next week, so-and-so will come." And, in the city everybody had his own domain—it was like the sidewalk here in Paris. One person didn't have the right to trespass on somebody else's sidewalk. Everybody had his own hundred yards, two hundred yards. Like the whores here. You see beggars here too. But the tramps of Paris are rich compared to them! Because really, what did you give them? And the schnorrers, there were a lot of them in Poland. They didn't all go from city to city. Some had their own place—in front of the synagogue, say, like in front of a church. Those places were the best ones. They'd sit in front of the synagogue, not on Saturday, not on holidays, but all week long: "Git a groshen, git a groshen, " give a penny!

But let's go back to the house. We were on the second floor, and the shelter was the two apartments. Next door lived somebody who was already old, already retired. He had a daughter,

[11] "Welcoming guests," shelter.

and when she got married, she lived there with the son-in-law, in the two rooms and kitchen. The son-in-law was a roofer, a trade that was quite common among the Jews.

Now the third floor. There was only one apartment. On the other side was the attic for drying clothes. The tenants of the house followed a schedule; sometimes they argued. And on the other side lived somebody called Franzuz. He had a tiny little grocery. The grocery was a quarter of his room. He would sell a herring or a liter of oil, a few apples, a few eggs, that's all.

Oh! I remember something that will interest you. If somebody died in the house, when there was a death, you had to empty all the buckets, all the water. You know why? Because the Malhemuves,^[12] the Angel of Death, when he comes, he kills a man with his sword. And afterward, he cleans it, he rinses it in the water of the whole house. So you have to throw out the water. My mother did that. Those are superstitions. You threw the water in the sink outside, in the staircase. It went down to the courtyard.

Poverty

Childhood memories are set against a background of poverty, as in the description of the house we have just heard. It is one of the subjects that recurs most frequently, whether in the shtetl or in the city: hunger, the cramped dwellings, bare feet in the snow—it all provokes a retrospective pity that does not preclude lucid reflection .

The episode of the hidden bread, told by Lazare M., is a sort of memory once removed since the narrator himself was not present at the scene. He reconstructs it, sixty years later, assuming his brother's subsequent confession. This is an example of a concatenation of memory: the individual here acts as a relay for his family, the spokesman for the group, while integrating the memories of others into his own experience. Individual memories, thus intersecting and reassumed, blend to constitute a collective memory:

The first time I saw my brother again after I left Poland was in 1955, in Israel. Because he had been in a concentration camp

[12] "Malhemuves "—Hebrew Malakh ha-mavet —the Angel of Death.

and afterward, he went to Israel. I saw him again for the first time in Ramat Gan, in Israel. And he told me this story, he said: "You remember when you went to the Diament's house to listen to the megillah of Esther? I had stayed home alone. There was a loaf of bread; it wasn't whole; it was already sliced. Without Mama knowing, without anybody knowing, I cut a piece of bread and ate it. And until now, you're the only one I've ever told the story to."

That gives you an idea of how well-off we were. In 1917, I was six and a half years old. My brother was born in '06; he was ten. How you ate, like that, a piece of dry bread. And the bread, in '17, that was black bread. There was more bran than bread in it and more potato, you know, potato starch. It wasn't a baguette like today.

And I'm telling you this story today for the first time—to you, for the first time since my brother told it to me. From '17 to '55, that's thirty-eight years. After thirty-eight years, he told it to me, thirty-eight years later. And I'm telling it in '80. From '17, that's sixty-three years. I was six years old.

I wanted to tell that story so much.

There are also memories of memories in Mathilde R.'s account (born in France in 1928). Before getting to her own story, she goes far back, to a time she knew only from the family tradition her parents passed on to her:

My paternal grandparents lived in a shtetl near Lodz, in a little village called Glownow [ . . .] Often the children didn't have enough to eat, but my grandmother could work wonders. For example, one thing really struck me when they told me about it. She went to a street where there was a guy with a little cart of potatoes. She bought potatoes from him and said: "I'm going to take the cart home; I'll get money and bring the cart back to you with the money." Then she went to the next street and sold the potatoes for a little more than what she had paid for them. She brought the cart back, gave him the money, and kept the difference. And for that she could buy a few kilos of potatoes for her children.

Georges F.

There was a very pretty field, like a park, on the banks of the river that went through the city. Every Saturday, when the weather was nice, from May on, we put up little huts of branches and we slept there. That would free our parents of four or five children. We spent the night and the next morning went back home to eat. That was poverty. We came to sleep, to clear out the room we lived in. Our room was maybe twelve or thirteen meters; we were seven children and our parents.

We built a house there out of logs, with trees, and that's how we lived, on the flattened ground. I remember that the house had two windows. There were three beds, a cabinet, a table, and chairs. That's what made us go outside in the morning, as soon as it was light. Every now and then, to clean up, the practice was for my sisters to get white sand and put it on the ground. That makes the room cleaner. That's how we lived.

Pieces of bread were rationed; children couldn't just eat whatever they wanted. The peasants we knew before (before the arrival of the weapons factory) helped us. I remember I had to go get milk in a jug, in winter, with a brother who was two years older than me. Then we sold the milk to Jews who wanted to buy it. We'd bring it to their house. Once I happened to slip in the snow and spill the jug of milk; so my brother said: "We'll add water; nobody will notice." They did notice, but we said that the cow wasn't as good as before for giving pure milk. We did really primitive things, even after civilization came. We carried milk and, every now and then, somebody gave us a piece of bread as payment and once a week they gave my mother a few pennies to pay for the milk.

There were also water carriers, men who carried water, in exchange for food, with a device on both shoulders, like you see in the histories of old cities, I don't know if that still exists in France. We too, we children, we also carried water; that's how we managed to get the basic necessities.

And in our house, in front of the room, they built a little hut for a Jewish merchant. He payed us by the month, a small rent. He put in a grocery. A grocery, it wasn't like today. When you

bought a pickled herring, it was by the piece. Cigarettes you bought one by one. When you had a piece of bread on one side, you went to get a piece of herring. It wasn't a whole herring you bought, they cut it up into maybe twenty pieces. That's how you ate. You managed to get through the day. And most of the time, you lived outside.

You went barefoot, even in winter. You wrapped your feet in potato sacks, that's how you walked. Once, the Americans arranged a social welfare setup, a kitchen for the poor, for the children. Sometimes I would carry my brother on my back because I had sacks on my feet while he was barefoot. I carried him all the way down there to get food. I was maybe seven years old. That's how we helped each other in the middle of winter. There were people whose feet froze; that was really poverty.

It was Georges F.'s mother who supplied the needs of the family with an indefatigable ingenuity because the father—a classical cultural feature, recalled here with some bitterness—spent his time praying. As for the children, still very young, they were forced to find ways of helping the mother.

My father could have worked, but he didn't want to because he was a religious fanatic. We weren't allowed to touch anything at all on Saturday. He went to pray every day, to study the Bible. It wasn't so much for the prayers, because you say prayers three times a day, in the morning, at noon, and at night. But he stayed in the house of prayer all day long. I don't know if it was to avoid eating or to study religion. There were a lot of men who did that. The synagogue was almost full.

It didn't start out as a synagogue. It was built by the villagers. Little by little, it developed, and that house eventually became a real synagogue. The poor even came to spend the night and sleep there. Those who wandered around on the roads had their meeting place in that house; they came to tell each other stories about their day, and they slept on the wooden benches.

I loved my mother very much—she was a really terrific woman. To be able to take care of seven children, go out in the morning, at four o'clock in the morning, winter and sum-

mer alike, to get things. She went to get poultry. She had to go all over the countryside to find a peasant who wanted to sell a chicken or a goose. She brought it back and had it killed by the shoihet ;^[13] then she'd sell the goose in pieces, by quarters.

When she left in the morning, at four, five o'clock, she'd come back by one, two o'clock in the afternoon. And we fasted while waiting for her to come. She had to walk: five miles for a woman, going and coming, naturally that took almost the whole day. She went on foot, since she didn't have money to take the train. She left us children to manage on our own. My father, he almost wasn't interested at all; he expected, just like us, that she'd be the one to bring home the bread. It's really a terrible memory that won't go away even now. Poverty, it's the same everywhere, but in Poland it was very common.

From seven to twenty-one, I remember the jobs I did. I wonder how I could have done all that in fourteen years. I don't even know how I learned to read and write. All I did, you can't imagine. There was lots of willingness, to see, to do . . .

Among other things, Georges F. helped porters unload merchandise.

Those porters, with their wagons, came from our town, from Skarzysko, to Kielce or Schidlovsk, because that was the railroad center, carrying sacks of flour, sugar, beans, food. I went with them, it took the whole day, to go and come back. The porter was well paid, and me, what did I earn? Almost nothing.

There were three of them, those porters in the village, who went from one village to another with their wagon. Once, the merchant came to see one of those horse owners and said to him:

"Listen, on Tuesday, there's a market in Vorotzk, you have to come. We'll go to the market, we'll spend the day, and then we'll come back. I'll pay you."

"I really want to, but you have to give me the money in advance to feed my horses and get them ready."

Horses were usually fed hay, but when you wanted them to do an especially big job, you had to give them oats, straw. That

[13] Ritual slaughterer.

meant paying in advance. And the next morning, there was a terrible storm, they couldn't leave. The merchant comes to see the porter:

"Give me back the money, since I gave you a deposit."

"Here, I'm going to show you what I did with your money."

And he takes him where the horses were; it wasn't even a stable:

"Pick up the droppings, you see, that's your money there!"

"Are you crazy?"

"What do you want from me? I got my horses ready—they ate. If it rains, it's not my fault! How would you like me to give back the money!"

So he gave him the biggest horse droppings. And that's the way it happened.

That horse dropping, proposed as payment for a debt, seems to stir up a repertoire of jokes (from a folklore perhaps more peasant than Jewish). But it is remarkable that Georges F. insists on the authenticity of the anecdote, and that he piles up a wealth of details which make the episode unique and real. Here the individual—with unquestioned sincerity—takes the collective memory for his own and inscribes it in his personal memory.

Apprenticeship

After these early activities, recalled in a joking tone (these were mere child's play), one soon went on to serious things: in these large, poor families, children started working very young, from the age of twelve or thirteen. For Georges F., memories of apprenticeship blend with those of his passage to adulthood: as he learned his trade as a tailor, he also learned the harshness of exploitative relationships.

A day of my apprenticeship in the shop: it meant coming in at five, six o'clock in the morning in winter. Then making the fire. That was the first thing.

Making the fire, bringing coal, it wasn't all that easy to carry the coal. It meant bringing forty-four pounds on my back from the coalman. We used coal for the fire. We used a cookstove, like they used to have here at one time. Then you had

to heat the pressing iron. That was the first thing. The irons weren't the same ones I have here either. The iron was made of iron. You put it in the fire, on hard coal. Not charcoal. Charcoal came later, that was already an advance. We heated up the iron on the coal; you poked inside with a shareizen .^[14] The iron weighed about ten or twelve pounds. When the workers came and started setting up, I had to take the irons out of the fire to put them by the big table. They weren't anything like the irons we used after the war.

Later, the iron was a wood iron, heated by charcoal. The work was even harder when they invented that business. You had to go outside and swing it with your hand like that [gesture ] so the coal would move to the front of the iron.

There were three men and two women who worked in the shop. As for the girls—one of them passed away in Paris; the other one was deported. They used to talk about all sorts of things, gossip. This one told how he went out with a girl; that one told about his worries—things I didn't know, coarse things. It shocked me terribly.

Then, afterward, at noon, we didn't make a hot lunch. Everybody went out to buy bread and sausage, and then we went back to work. It was very hard on an apprentice. Just learning to do the work, to learn to hold the needle on the thimble, that took at least three months. Yes, because that finger had to be bent like that [gesture ]. Because men, they sew with a thimble that doesn't have a bottom, they don't prick like that, but here. So, to have that finger bent right, you tied it down and you slept that way so the finger stayed bent the right way and you could hold the needle to go through there. Bending the fingers that way was hard.

And when I took the irons out of the fire for the guys who were going to iron, that was a very important thing. It was a big deal to iron a piece; it took all day. When the piece was ironed, the worker showed it to the boss and he said: "See, that garment is alive; I put my soul in it."

The worker who had a piece to iron, you better not talk

[14] A poker.

to him! So much so that I once got smacked because the iron wasn't hot enough when I took it out of the oven. It was a real scandal. The guy who smacked me, he lives in Paris now. We see each other every now and then. He's a little older than me, maybe ten years older. And when the iron was too hot, it burned.

He showed the piece to the boss. The boss would say: "It's not worked enough." And he would explain how it should be done: "You have to put your vest on the iron!" Your vest meant put your chest on the iron, lean on the iron, to make it even heavier than the ten pounds. A worker could work on the same few inches for an hour pushing the iron like that.

And the day went on like that till night. Sometimes you slept in the shop, especially the men. If there was a garment that had to be finished for the next day, you had no choice. That's how it was: you slept on the big table a few hours, and then you went back to work.

Almost all the work was done by hand. There was a machine, but, for a garment that took thirty-six hours, it was used maybe three hours, not even that, to make the big seams. All the rest was done by hand; that's why it took so long. But a garment, it wasn't like now: when you made one, it lasted from marriage to grandchildren. There was even a time when you turned it inside out; we also did that in the Liberation.^[15] When you turned it inside out, it's the apprentice who had to undo it and take out all that dust that had piled up: you came out of that with your hands black as a coal miner.

And that all happened in one room. The boss had a room, and the boss's wife had a room on the side. Because, in general, at that time the boss's wife wasn't in the business. You would see her when she brought her husband something to eat. But she wasn't really involved with the business.

When you took on a thing, you did it from beginning to end. Nobody specialized, except for one finisher who did the detail work. The worker was paid by the piece; when he took on a piece, he had to finish it. That's how the work went. During

[15] In France after World War II.

the week, you made . . . Of course, you can't compare with now. Here, my wife and I, together, how many did we make? Three times six, eighteen to twenty pieces a week. But back when I was an apprentice, a worker, a good worker, if he did two pieces a week, he was already somebody, a fine worker.

Now it's not the same at all. At the time we used the iron with the charcoal, that poisoned the shop because, in winter, the doors and windows were closed, and it gave off a toxic gas. One time, while preparing the irons for the others, I became sick, poisoned, and I passed out. The boss and his wife came. They were scared; I had passed out on the floor. It was winter and they took me out on the snow. It was the only way to make me come to, to lay me down in the snow. That wasn't the first such accident. You knew that when somebody was poisoned by charcoal, you had to get him out to the snow. I came to, returned to the shop, and went back to work.

[ . . .] When I left, when I left home, my mother cried like a child. I was the only one who provided some relief to her poverty. The other children also worked, but they didn't earn as much as I did. Maybe I was more responsible than the others: everything I earned I gave to the family.

Jewish Ingenuity

The social conditions of the Jews of central and eastern Europe were actually more diverse than the preceding images or scenes would suggest. If most of them did indeed belong to the lower and poorer classes, some came from an educated or economic elite. Were they privileged people? Not always. They proudly recall that some ancestor or some relative owed his success only to his intelligence, his inventiveness, and his hard work. Memories of poverty find their counterpoint in praise of Jewish ingenuity.

Louise M. (born at the turn of this century):

My grandfather was from another region of Silesia. He had the idea, the almost absurd idea, of starting up a factory there. There wasn't anything—no coal, no water—there was very little

water. There was only one thing in that region, rape, a lot of rape, that yellow plant with a captivating smell. He had this idea because they were already exporting it; that is, merchants from other regions were buying it to extract the oil from it. Then they sold the oil because it was the only means of lighting. So, he said to himself: Why not extract the oil on the spot?

He was very young; he didn't have any money. He looked and looked and it was very hard because you needed a steam engine, a big machine. Naturally, there was no such thing, but he, with all his ideas, said to himself: Certainly, in other parts of Germany, you still find machines for scrap that aren't very modern and that don't work very well, but that do the job all the same. And he found exactly that in a former monastery, and there he set up that factory, with that old machine. I even have a photo of that machine—it's quite something—with my father and my grandfather next to it.

Happiness, Nostalgia

"In spite of poverty, we were happy." Is this just retrospective illusion? It is certainly a sense of happiness, however, that dwells in the heart of memory. The fullness experienced during childhood has at least three dimensions: familiarity with nature, solidarity with members (near and far) of the Jewish community, and especially the warmth of the family nucleus. This environment, composed of concentric circles, formed a totality in which individuals, as they remember it, were harmoniously integrated.

This is how Georges F., the apprentice tailor who described himself as a kind of "street urchin" of the shtetl, sees the joys of his childhood, as rural scenes unfold before his eyes.

That's my youth. I don't know if children now are happier than we were then. We were happy all the same. It really was something. In winter, we were cold, but we had fun. What were our toys? We could have fun with anything: on the snow with wooden boards, that was one of the pleasures. Especially the things we made ourselves. We made shoes out of potato sacks,

but we were happy. And sleds, skates: a piece of iron wire and you made a skate and you learned. That's how we had fun. It was really . . . I think we were happier.

I don't want to judge; maybe it's because I didn't know anything else. It was nice; it was nature. There was the river. In the summer, you learned how to swim. We lived like savages, outside, and it was good. We ate what we could. Our parents gave us pieces of bread and butter to go to the beach, and we shared—there wasn't any selfishness. We protected the other children, watched over them. We banded together; that's how we managed to survive, to feed ourselves. That's how we lived, spending whole days in the fields, on the moors (the lonke ).

This solidarity between groups of children extends to all members of the Jewish community and is accompanied by the simple happiness of being together. People take pleasure, for example, in recalling the gatherings of men, women, and children who assembled in the house of prayer to listen to the storytellers who went from village to village. The pleasure of the tales and the conviviality it sustained are certainly not specifically Jewish, but, in his narrative, Georges F. emphasizes the role of oral transmission and his concern for preserving a living memory:

Oral transmission is really something terrific. I was talking with some friends the other day: "How can you remember all that?" In my opinion, what is transmitted by speech is as solid as by writing. You saw the transmission from parents and grandparents to children. All you have to do is press a certain spot, a button, and people start talking to you. I could spend twenty-four hours telling you stories that have remained engraved on my memory and that come back. Of course, in a book, when you're reading, you can go back. Oral transmission will disappear with my generation. My children, of course, learned by reading, not by listening to stories.

We were in contact with the person who told the stories, we sat there, we listened to him. When the guy came, they called him a bal'-darshan .^[16] It was something terrific. He stayed for

[16] Teller of biblical stories.

twenty-four hours talking to us. We got together in the shil .^[17] He'd come on Friday about noon and stay for Saturday. He talked to hand down certain things, Bible stories, Rachel, Joseph; he told stories from his own life too. Everybody was there to listen to him. On Friday night, they'd invite him for dinner. The richest family or somebody who wanted to hear him some more would take him home. He'd invite him without telling his wife, and she'd be so surprised she wouldn't want to give him anything to eat. She'd cut a little piece of bread for him with a little bit of soup. He'd be hungry when he came back to sleep on the bench of the house of prayer.

The next day, he'd start telling again, after noon, because, until noon there were prayers. When it was a famous storyteller, the shil was full. There wasn't any room to come near. Everybody came: children, adults, men and women separately. Some people came to learn and followed his stories in the holy books, like somebody who knows a piece of opera and who follows the score. It was all the joy and life that returned. It was a satisfaction like we have now when we see a play we like a lot. For half a day you listen and forget all of life's woes.

That lasted from Friday noon to Saturday night. Then he left again. He'd make a tour of the villages. All week long, he'd walk. It was only on Saturday that he could gather such a crowd. He fed himself however he could; sometimes they barely gave him enough to survive. But he didn't get discouraged. He went on all the same, to transmit what he had to say. All week long he was on the road, and on Saturday he started again . . .

At the center of all childhood happiness is that which one has lived with one's parents. Even more than in the shtetl or in the Jewish quarter, it was within the family that one felt at home, sheltered from surrounding hostility. The family circle generally meant father, mother, brothers and sisters, sometimes an aunt or an uncle. Memory here rarely goes beyond grandparents. It is this early refuge of peace and affection that appears in memory as the ideal of all joy. The rest of life will preserve a longing for it. Later on, in the course of returns, encounters,

[17] Shul, synagogue.

or dreams, the trace of paradise lost looms, stirring up the most intense emotion: one has a sense of finding oneself again.

Georges F.

But to tell the truth, going back fifty years, it wasn't as bad as all that. You see, I still have nostalgia for my village, it was good.

[ . . .] That village, my memories come back to me now. I miss it somehow, even though I live in France. It's an amazing thing. I can't explain how a human being, after fifty years, can feel such nostalgia: to see that village again, in spite of all the hardship he had gone through there.

I tell you, I miss it—even though I've been in France for so long already—I miss that courtyard, that life. What cooking do you love best? Your mother's. In spite of the poverty, we managed to live. I ate dry bread all week. I was solid as a Turk. Of the seven children, no one had a sickness. No vaccinations against smallpox, diphtheria, nothing. We lived like animals, but we were sturdy. I see my grandson, at eleven; you push him with a breeze and he falls over. Me, at seven, I was dragging bulls and cows that could have carried me off like a fly, but I broke them. I was very sturdy.

Martha F. : All in all, in spite of the poverty, you have better memories than me, childhood memories.

Georges F. : Because you, you didn't grow up in that environment. What was your experience?

Martha F. : I was in Paris.

Georges F. : In Paris! That was something else altogether. You didn't know . . .

Martha F. : I had a different form of poverty. You had a happy poverty!

Georges F. : A happy poverty! Me, I just had poverty! [Laughs, then explains ] I had a happy poverty because we lived together. But you had a lonely poverty, without any family. We, in our poverty, were surrounded by everybody—cousins, aunts, pow-

erful things. I had an aunt. At the time she was, I don't know, she was born before the twentieth century. She was a midwife; she delivered all the children in the Jewish village. She never knew what it was to read and write. And she used to tell us stories; we'd gather in that courtyard. We forgot poverty, we had other joys. And the cousin who took a tour of Europe—he also came to tell stories. It took your mind off eating. And others came to tell us. There was really a family life in that courtyard that just doesn't exist anymore. The family cell is broken. It's over. That story is over.

Martha F. : You don't have any photos of your mother . . .

Georges F. : I had a whole suitcase of photos, and the Germans took them away, on Rue du Chemin-Vert. The only photo I had on me, of my father, that remained. Otherwise, they took everything from me. They emptied the apartment. Yes, there was a whole suitcase of photos! What would you see on those photos? You'd see old people, like in that book.^[18] They all look alike, like two drops of water. It was only the soul that changed, the way they gave themselves to the children, the way they took care of the house. Otherwise, the people didn't change. You can look at your grandmother and a person who's in there—it's almost the same.

Traditions

In the city, as in the shtetl, to live with your own meant to respect those norms theoretically accepted by all the members of the Jewish community. There were certainly dissonant voices (as we shall see in the next chapter), but they could not escape the constraints of the ever-present tradition. This tradition was composed of various elements (language, dietary rules, cooking, religious practices and beliefs) that coalesced in Jewish memory as a specific and coherent whole. It is there where collective identity sank its roots. Even among those whose families were hardly devout and who called themselves atheists, nos-

[18] The Old Country: The Lost World of European Jews, ed. Abraham Shulman, preface by Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974).

talgia for the lost world included a religious dimension. Either they evoke Shabbat (often blended with the image of happiness within the family circle) or celebrations of major holidays, which were inscribed in the larger Jewish environment.

Anna D. (of Lodz, born around 1918):

On Shabbes, nobody worked. All the shops were closed. On Thursday morning, you bought what you needed to prepare by Friday afternoon. Then you lit the candles. You ate a good meal, on Saturday too. So as not to cook on Saturday, to keep for a long time, you made cholent .^[19] It had meat with grated potatoes and you left it with the baker until Saturday noon when people would go to pick it up. You can't imagine how good that was. There was also stuffed fish. That was very good, believe me, it was better than here.

Now, after the war, all that's over. The meat was better than here, like all the food. You can't imagine the bread! There weren't baguettes; bread came by the kilo. Cholent, gefilte fish,^[20] stews, strudels. . . . Here they don't know anything at all. It was very good, everybody was happy—until the war, that is.

Yacob-Jacques, L. (born at the end of the nineteenth century in a shtetl in the area of Lublin):

On Shabbes even the poor did something special. They didn't have money to buy big fish so they bought little fish. They ate a bit of a small chicken, soup with noodles, with beans. Have you ever eaten it? On Friday night people went all out. They'd sweep the house, put a clean cloth on the table—and the rolls, the challah, with little cloths. My mother made the challah herself. And she lit candles before my father went to shil.

Charles H.:

I remember the atmosphere that prevailed in a synagogue on Yom Kippur. It was something extraordinary, that atmosphere.

[19] A stew of meat or poultry, potatoes or dried beans, cooked on a slow fire from Friday afternoon on and served as the main meal on Saturday.

[20] Stuffed carp.

I don't know, I've never gone to a synagogue for the holidays in France—I should do it before I die—but I did go in the United States. I went with my brother-in-law to a synagogue, in Bridgeport, where there's a big Jewish community. Well, personally, I was pretty shocked because the atmosphere just wasn't there.

First the smell, the smell of a hundred candles lit since the night before (afterward, you mustn't light them). They are candles like in church, big candles that last a long time, more than twenty-four hours. Every family brings at least one, or even several, that they light because it's also in part in memory of the dead. Then, that smell all evening, all night. More than that, to get through the fast, they breathed smelling salts so as not to be sick.

At home, we had a real tallit of linen, with black stripes. And, on Yom Kippur, the adults, the heads of families, all wore a kittel over their clothes, a kind of white cloth tunic, as a sign of mourning, penitence. That's the clothing of the dead; they're buried nude in that shroud. Back then, in that little town, the Jews were buried nude in a shroud. That's the shroud they wore on Yom Kippur. So, imagine that white color, with the tallit spread over their head. The prayers were chanted by a hazan^[21] and repeated aloud by everyone, all day long in that fashion.

Georges F.:

At Pesah, the father was the king and the mother was the queen. To prepare that holiday, once a year, they cleaned the house by taking everything out to the courtyard: the cabinets, the beds, the chairs. Everything was taken out and cleaned so there wouldn't be even a trace of the food from the year. It was all renewed. We waited for that holiday like for the Messiah. The children waited for that holiday like for the Messiah because they took out everything, they cleaned, they swept. They even took out the mattress to change the straw. Bread was forbidden, so whatever bread they collected they burned in the courtyard. All the neighbors together lit a fire and burned it.

[21] Cantor.

Then everyone set up for Passover. Believe me, it was a fantastic holiday. People bought food for eight days—unleavened bread, potatoes, eggs. There were two sets of dishes. You know, that bread, the unleavened bread, could only be made by Jews. They made it in a special oven, eight days in advance, and prepared it by hand, nothing but water and flour, no salt, nothing. Now they manufacture it in factories and it comes in squares. Before, back home, they made it round. Then there was a moment of prayer with a glass of wine. That wine was made with dry grapes a year in advance—every year—and it was used for the next year. It wasn't only the eight days: all year you worked for that holiday. They made goose fat in advance too, in the winter, and since Passover comes in spring, they prepared those things for the holiday six months in advance.

Martha F. : Where did your mother get money for all that?

Georges F.:

There was a fund. We all had to buy food for eight days though not everybody could manage. So they made a fund. The rich helped the poor, especially for unleavened bread. It was distributed almost free. On that holiday everybody was equal; people were on the same level. The richest and the poorest were on the same level. The rich man couldn't eat anything different from the poor man. Maybe he ate more meat, more unleavened bread. But it was the same, he didn't eat anything different.

And then, on the night of the Seder, at home, that prayer, it was terrific. There were five of us left at home, father, mother, the five children around the table. The table was set with unleavened bread, the pieces of unleavened bread were put on top of one another, separated by a clean napkin so they wouldn't touch each other. There was horseradish, hard-boiled eggs. The Seder began at about eight o'clock at night and lasted until one in the morning. Father said the prayer, he told the whole history of the exodus from Egypt, and the youngest child asked nine questions: why do we eat unleavened bread, why do we eat nine kinds of raw vegetables, bitter herbs. You had to

taste nine kinds of food that night, nine, always that uneven number: why, I don't know.

At one particular moment in the prayer, father picked up a piece of unleavened bread. He gave it to the children and mother to taste, he took some himself, and they ate around the table. The piece in the middle stayed all year, until the next year. Then, there was a moment of prayer for which the glass of wine was prepared. It was reserved for the Messiah. I don't know if it was the Messiah. They called it Ele Nuve .^[22]Ele Nuve, it's not really the Messiah, it's a chosen soul, I don't know exactly, a chosen soul from the family, who came to taste the wine at the table. So that was the most solemn moment, the most awesome moment of the night. Father would get up. Everybody stood up, and they opened the door and began the prayer to make that soul enter, that holy soul that came down from heaven to taste wine with us. It was really the most awesome moment, we trembled with fear. Then, I don't know how it's done, we looked at the wine and the wine moved. It's unbelievable. My father remarked: "You see that somebody came to drink!"

That's how it happened. It's an unforgettable memory. I've been to Seders in Paris, but they were imitations. What happened in my youth, I was six, seven years old, it wasn't that at all.

In recalling the episode of the wine that moved, Georges F. has almost relived in the present the emotion he felt on those Seder nights. But at the same time, he distances it by injecting it with humor, which modifies the tone of the tale. The scene he goes on to describe is found in the memories of others and seems to belong (like the history of the horse droppings above) to a certain folkloric and rather irreverent tradition! Here, too, individual memory works as a relay of the collective memory.

One day—it was when I was grown up—I remember that somebody played a trick on the neighbors. As soon as they

[22] Eliyahu Hanavi, the Prophet Elijah. According to Jewish tradition, the coming of the Messiah is announced by the return of the Prophet Elijah; this is why one awaits the latter on Passover.

opened the door to let that holy soul come in, somebody pushed a goat into the house. They were terribly scared. It was quite a scandal.

From irreverent humor, one gradually slips into the critical spirit. Until he was eleven, Maurice N. lived in a small town near Warsaw. His father went from being a fervent Hasid to a "total atheist": his adherence to Communism even contributed to convincing him to emigrate. Maurice N. received a traditional education in Poland, but the memories he has preserved of it are inevitably inflected by his father's subsequent development and by his own convictions. Nevertheless, he levels his criticism with a bit of a smile; his anecdote sounds like a kind of parable.

Prohibitions—there were a lot of them. That's all there was. You didn't have the right to eat this, you didn't have the right to go here, you didn't have the right. . . . There were a lot of things. . . . You mustn't do that because a Jewish boy doesn't do that. For example, running, you mustn't run; skating, you mustn't skate. You mustn't do sport. You have to go to heder. You mustn't do the same thing as the goys. Prohibitions, from all sides.

I remember, when I was little, one day, I was maybe five, six years old. I was at my uncle's house. It was cherry season and I went outside with a handful of cherries. There was a little girl who wanted my cherries and I didn't want to give them to her. So she jumped up to catch the cherries. And this little girl was a goy. I threw away every cherry she touched, because it wasn't kosher anymore. That's how she ate up all my cherries.

Apparitions, Miracles

The world of ghosts, dybbuks,^{[ 23]}devils, of visions, apparitions, miracles—that world magnified in Isaac Bashevis Singer by the magic of writing—does exist in memory. Earlier, in the description of the house, we noted the theme of the Angel of Death, who passes through and washes his sword in the water kept in the containers belonging to the

[23] Dybbuk: an evil spirit that enters into a living person.

house. That supernatural universe appears in snatches, in certain detours of the tale, surprising the narrator himself, who then breaks off his recollection with a smile. Sometimes he talks spontaneously of "superstitions" and proposes his own, thoroughly rational interpretation. Dybbuks, ghosts? Yes, those are the stories he was told. He even witnessed them, but he certainly doesn't believe in them. And yet, he recalls with a mixture of unease and affection that his parents and his grandparents did believe in them: a received memory that he both repeats and from which he distances himself.

We are not surprised to find a certain folkloric vein injected into Georges F.'s personal story.

In the shop, we worked at night, as I told you. Once, you know, the fellows were joking, and somebody said: "Hey, I'm going to go to the cemetery and, to prove it to you, I'll plant a stick there!" The Jewish cemetery was outside the town and we were scared. . . . : crossing the cemetery at night was something unimaginable. When I came to Paris, I lived right next door to Père-Lachaise, on Rue Pierre-Bayle, but I wouldn't have dreamt of going to the window and looking at the tombs of the dead . . .

So he says to us: "I'm going to go to the cemetery at midnight, you'll see!" It was an idiotic bet, but he went just the same. They gave him a stick, and he said: "I'm going to put it on such and such a grave, and tomorrow you can go see if it's true." So he went. And since we wore long clothes—you know the long coats the Jews wear, he had a long coat like that, which got stuck with that stick; it went across it. And when he wanted to leave he felt something holding him back. The next day, he was found dead.

It's terrible, but that's what happened. They went to see the next day because they were worried, but they didn't dare go there at one o'clock in the morning. And they found him dead. He died of fear . . . [ . . .]

I remember the rabbi who came, the most illustrious rabbi who used to come to us, for a stay. Because they also went from one village to another, to supervise what was going on, how Judaism was developing. He came and the Jews came to tell

him. You had to bring him presents, food. For example, when he spent a Saturday in a village, all the rich Jews brought him food. They came to tell him, they'd come to say: "I have three daughters, I want to marry them off, give us advice." So he'd say to those people: "Go back home, you're going to see, you're going to marry off such and such a daughter this year, there will be a miracle," and all that. Sometimes it did happen. But pious Jews believed.

Yacob-Jacques L.:

So here's the miracle. My father met his father, who was walking down the road. They met at the crossing. The night before, my grandfather had been called to sell some rings or something. So, when he found my father on the way, he said to him:

"Michael, where are you going?"

"Down to the village, to N., to fix watches."

"That's just where I'm going; it's not worth it for you to go."

"Of course, if you're going there, I won't go."

My father returned home. My grandfather was away; he didn't return. That went on for eight days, ten days, he wasn't there. And all of a sudden, they bring him back—dead, killed. He was killed on the road. And my mother says to me:

"You see what that means. God didn't want your father to die."

But I thought otherwise. They wouldn't have killed my father because he didn't have anything on him. They killed my grandfather because he was carrying a lot of jewels, very valuable ones. But if my father had gone there, they wouldn't have killed him. I didn't dare tell my mother that. She believed, fine.

Listen, there was another miracle. They were preparing for the funeral and sent people to the cemetery to dig a grave. It was winter, and the ground was so frozen that they couldn't dig. They worked for two hours, three hours, they just couldn't do it. It was already noon on Friday. What were they going to do? You see the problem? What were they going to do? Everybody was crying.

Then, all of a sudden, they saw a soldier right next to them, and this soldier asks:

"What are you doing there?"

My father and his brother explained what was happening.

"Give me the thing for digging."

He took the shovel and, in five minutes, the grave was done. Then they buried my grandfather. Afterward, my father said to me:

"I wanted to thank the soldier or to pay him. When I looked, I didn't find him; he wasn't there anymore."

For them, what was that? A miracle. But I'm going to tell you what it was. It was a soldier on leave passing by who saw people crying. I don't know what—he was a peasant who knew how to dig a grave. I didn't tell my mother that, but that's how I understood it, see? Them, they always lived with miracles. Always miracles, they believed in them.

Yiddishkeit

Yiddishland has disappeared; Yiddishkeit remains. The term cannot be reduced simply to linguistic or religious elements: it includes much broader connotations, indicating an entire way of life based on a mix of rules, customs, behaviors, tastes, and bonds of solidarity. It encompasses as well a totality in which individuals find not only a place but also meaning, to the extent that they preserve its indelible imprint in the most private part of their being. Even in those who admit their indifference to religion and proclaim their hostility to rabbinic teaching, there survives an attachment, sometimes unconscious, to values they themselves define as "Jewish." The religious tradition is transposed onto the secular world and henceforth seen magnified as moral law. These ever-present values inform thought, sensibility, all of life.

A longtime "fellow traveler" of the Communist party, Robert S. (born in 1907), contrasts the education he received at home, within the family, with the lavish instruction in school, in this case, a Polish school. After immigrating to France in the late 1920s, he mastered the French language, thanks to strenuous efforts, and achieved a certain

social success, of which he is proud. But fifty years later, he still resorts to Yiddish to express his deepest feelings.

This Jewish culture was given to me by my father. He handed down to me what he had received from the tradition. When I compare what I learned at home and what I learned in the Polish school (about either Polish or German or Scandinavian or some other literature), I'm all confused. Why? Nowhere do I find anything that corresponds to what I learned at home, to what the Jewish tradition taught me. A primarily Jewish education is the sense of solidarity and that love of living in a family-type community.

Yiddishkeit —I know I was there, my whole life—all the everyday things were made of it. The other culture I received, Polish culture, was in addition; French culture too. What makes me a Jew is what exists inside me. I feel it. I feel it every time I have to make a decision. When I came to France, in 1928, I spoke Polish and I sought the words I needed to express myself in French; I translated into French. Now, after more than fifty years, I still live in France and it's the other way around: I think in French and I translate into another language if I have to. Basically, when I want to say something closest to what I feel, the only word I can find that fits is the Yiddish word.

3—
Happy Holidays, Family Feuds

While the Jews of Europe regularly recall religious rituals even when they are not believers, they do not willingly report those major rites of passage that may have marked their own lives or those of their close friends and relatives. Was this perhaps modest silence? Or rather a sign of the erosion of rituals, the secularization of habits that has turned marriage or birth into ordinary events? Among the Jews of the Mediterranean basin, more anchored in a traditional society where values and gestures were handed down from generation to generation, those moments have preserved a strong glow in memory. The arrival of the first son, the bar mitzvah, marriage all occupy a large place in memories.

"A Very Nice Love Story"

Marriage, as reported by women, is the drama most especially rich in emotions, fears, and expectations. Sometimes they tell about it with laughter, like Georgette A., who, in spite of her calculations, found that she had her period on the day of the ceremony and so could not consummate her marriage. Sometimes it is with heavy heart because one has submitted to a forced marriage, had hoped for a better offer, or at least a nice wedding. Happy or not, marriage always merits a story. Sometimes it is a love story, the idyll—in the literary sense—of an encounter, of trials one must face, of happiness that comes in fulfillment of the hopes one had nurtured. Mathilde B., born in Bizerte in 1892, sees her whole life as "a very nice love story."

I must write my memoirs because I have a very nice love story. It shows how many disappointments people bear, how much patience they have when they love each other. It's very beautiful and that's my life. It all rests on that.

He was a marvelous man. How good that man was! And handsome—what beauty! He was very handsome, blond. And he really must have had perseverance, because I met him when I was fifteen and I couldn't get married until I was twenty-seven! Our parents didn't want to let us, they didn't want to. Because when I came into the world. . . . First, let me tell you: our mothers are sisters, we're first cousins. Eugénie is my mother's sister. My mother's name was Clara, and my aunt was called Eugénie. So, when the oldest son was born, they intended him for the future daughter the other sister would have. The future daughter was me. They intended us for one another, the way they used to do. As for us, we were children. We didn't understand anything. He lived in Béjà, and I lived in Bizerte. We didn't know each other at all. And once, they sent the oldest one to us there, the one they intended for me, Sansonnet. And he was happy: "That's my wife, that's my wife, that's my wife." As for me, I didn't like that at all. I didn't realize the significance of the thing. Then he left; we didn't meet anymore. And Gaston, who became my husband, I had not yet met him. Because you didn't travel like nowadays. It was a big deal to come from Béjà to Bizerte, a big excursion. Even more so since my mother-in-law had had a lot of children and didn't move around easily. So one fine day, around Passover, they decided to take me to their house in Béjà. And who was to accompany me? Gaston, who was studying in Tunis. He was at the Lycée Carnot in Tunis and he's the one who was to take me to Béjà. By the way, Aunt Irène told him: "Gaston, pay attention, you're going to take Mathilde, you know that she's pretty. Careful not to fall in love with her!" She sensed it all, eh! I myself didn't know anything about it. He came; I didn't know him. "Oh," I say, "my God, how handsome you are!" [Laughter ] "How handsome you are, what a pretty blond!" Gray suit, elegant, magnificent. Since I was very direct, I said everything I thought, you know. And I went on: "You are a handsome guy!" We had a good time

in a cousinly fashion. It just happened. We made the trip together. And when we got down there and they started saying "This is Sansonnet's wife, this is Sansonnet's wife," Gaston, poor boy, he thought I was his fiancée. He had fallen in love with me and started crying and carrying on. Since he was still very young, he had become surly. The two of them fought over me. I myself didn't understand anything at all. And one fine day, the family was behaving in an odd manner. What's going on? My God, my God, I felt like a stranger in that world because I had never been to their house. And what was it all about? It was because Gaston, on leaving Béjà to go back to school, had sent me a postcard on which he had written: "From the one who knew how to love you."

But he sent it to his father's house, and they didn't tell me. The father was beside himself and the mother too: "What, he took his brother's betrothed. That can't be." Poor me, I hadn't known. Later on they told me. And naturally I was very hurt by the whole thing.

"Because you already loved him?"

Certainly. . . . It was love at first sight. Gaston, I loved him. . . . That's normal when you see a man who kisses your hands, who weeps to kiss your hand and to take a burning kiss from you in secret . . . especially when you're fifteen. . . . Oh, really, it's a nice story to tell, even though I did suffer from it. We were both fifteen; he was two months younger than me.

In short, I went back home, and I was roundly scolded. "What have you done! You did something bad!" So my father-in-law, who was so wrought up, said: "Well, too bad for her, she won't take either one of them. She'll remain an old maid like her sister." (Yes, my sister wasn't yet married.) So my parents had their pride wounded. They insisted that I make a rich marriage. Aunt Henriette was there with Mama, Grandmother Taita, and all of them. There was a rich young man, and they wanted to stick me with him. But that wouldn't do at all. I refused. I was lucky enough to be able to refuse, because, there, in those days, you didn't marry the younger daughter before the older one.

The war broke out and affairs of the heart were somehow sorted out.

Sansonnet came on leave. And he told his parents that he wasn't interested in me. He was very nice about it. He said to them: "Since Gaston is so much in love with her, fine, let Gaston have her." And that's how, at the end of the war of '14, we were engaged. [The wedding was finally celebrated. ] Now, that, I have to tell you. There we were, my wedding night, it was terrible. There wasn't any way of having personal satisfaction. It hurt me very much, and the blood, and the pain was excruciating. O.K., I put that down to . . . anyway. But the next day, when we went to Sousse [for a honeymoon ] and, like everybody else, I wanted to have relations, it hurt me so much and I was bleeding so much that he had to go get a doctor. When we came back from the honeymoon, no relations, nothing at all. I still had pains in my lower stomach, it's scary. We didn't tell anybody because it was shameful. You think I'd tell that to my mother and my mother-in-law? My God! For a year, we stayed like that.

Does Mathilde think of the story of Jacob and Rachel when she tells her own tale, of Jacob's love for his younger cousin and the waiting twice imposed before he could take her as his wife? No, she hasn't read the Bible and doesn't refer to it. Nor does she refer to Bathsheba when, recalling the dangers of World War II, she tells how she had a scarf brought to her daughter, an adolescent in the full flower of her beauty, to cover her hair, the sight of which might have stirred the passion of the German soldiers .

Suzanne T. still has a painful memory of her marriage. "The blush of shame" crosses her face when she tells of it, for her husband's parents had fostered other ambitions for their son and had mounted a vain but cruel resistance to that union. Here is the story, now come to life and rich in details, of the course of the wedding. We are in Sétif, in 1928.

My mother's sister, the older one, lived in Constantine. She had nine children, six girls and three boys. Her husband was a secondhand dealer. In 1927, her oldest child, Léon, came to do a year of military service in Sétif. Naturally, he came to our house every night. One night a few months later, my father

came home and said to my mother: "Tomorrow, my uncle and aunt are coming to ask for our daughter in marriage to their son." We were eating supper, and my cousin got up and said to my mother: "Aunt, I want to marry Suzanne." My father answered: "You know very well that your mother will never want this marriage. You heard her last week when she was here. What did she say? That she had found a girl from a good family who will bring you furniture to fill an apartment, a trousseau, jewels, and fifty thousand." In those days, fifty thousand was a fortune. "So how do you expect her to accept my daughter, who doesn't have either jewels or a trousseau or an apartment or money? Don't plan on my daughter because your parents will never agree." The man who was to become my husband answered my mother and father: "I'm the one who's getting married—I don't need furniture or a trousseau." On Friday, he asked for a twenty-four-hour leave to go to his parents. He informed them. So his father and mother said to him: "You'll never marry her." He told them he would get married in spite of them, that he was old enough to decide his own fate.

Two weeks before the wedding, the dressmaker came to the house to sew the gowns and the housecoats. In those days, you didn't go to the dressmaker; you had her come to your house. She made the wedding gown of satin and lace; and a satin gown for the henna night,^[1] a dress of pink-beige georgette crepe for the day after the wedding, a blue dress of Moroccan crepe, a white dressing gown, a pink one, a yellow one, and a blue one. It was already a celebration, two weeks in advance.

A week before the wedding, in spite of everything, my mother went to Constantine to see her sister and brother-in-law. Mama told them to come, that that wasn't done. People would talk if they didn't come. Her husband answered: "Yes, we'll come." But she didn't want to hear of it. My mother went in the morning, and she came back at night. Of course, we waited for her at the station. We had understood that they wouldn't come.

[1] Henna night: a sequence of the wedding ritual in which the bride's hands are smeared with the reddish-orange dye of the leaves of the plant henna (Lawsonia inermis ).

Since she couldn't manage both the cooking and the wedding, she [the mother ] had arranged for a cook. My cousins and my aunts were there to make the meals for the henna night and for the night of the wedding. And the whole family was there to serve the people at the tables and take care of everything. The dressmaker had finished sewing. She herself was my maid of honor.

The week of the wedding, that is, on Monday, they accompanied me to the bath all by myself. On Tuesday, it was the day of the girls who accompanied me. We were all dressed in blue. On Wednesday, the night of the henna and the mikvah [ritual bath ], the married women accompanied me, but none of the girls. It was my oldest aunt who made me enter the mikvah and who said the regular prayer. She made me put my head in the water seven times, and then she helped me out. They were dressed in pink, like me. There were youyous [ululating ] everywhere. During the day, my mother had made the bread and meat that were served to everybody. Then came the cakes, the jams, and the sugared almonds. (I forgot to say that on Monday and Tuesday there were also jams and sugared almonds.) In those days, that was the custom.

After the food, my aunt—the same one—put a pink veil over my head so no man would see me and so I wouldn't look at them. I was all in pink; even my slippers were pink. A woman on each side held my arms. Behind, there were musicians. The tables were set up in the courtyard, all around the house, with carpets in front of the entrance door. They sat us down, my fiancé and me, next to the musicians. They put a lot of mattresses on the ground, a rug, a low table; two candelabras with big pink candles, a large yellow copper plate in the middle of the table, a candelabra on each side, flowers. The middle of the courtyard was empty.

We got to the house. It was 7:30. The musicians were at their table and started playing. Arabic-style, of course. There were already a lot of people. All around the balcony, the neighbors and everybody were celebrating. The men started serving drinks at the tables. We had everything. Later, they cleared it

away and started serving supper. That went on until after eleven o'clock. There were a lot of them to make sure the people had everything they wanted. They served them drinks, the women brought food, the men and the women ran around to see to it that everyone was satisfied. There were more than two hundred people and the next day, even more.

They left the middle of the courtyard free so there would be room for people to dance. The musicians started singing the bride's song. The older woman came to put henna on the palms of my hands with a gold coin and on the soles of my feet, which were tied with a red ribbon. My husband didn't want them to put it on him. Later on, it was the turn of the girls, the young men, and the married women. Then they brought fruit, cakes, jam, and liqueurs. The women danced, and the men gave them money to put on the musicians' plate. One man was standing up and shouting: "Twenty francs for the bride, fifteen francs for the groom," and everybody was singing and everybody was dancing. As for the musicians, if they got a lot of money, they were happy, and that was fine; if not, you gave them more money. But they collected beyond their wildest dreams. They answered yes when we asked them if they were satisfied. At two o'clock in the morning, the musicians left and so did the people. Then, we had to sweep the courtyard, pick up the dirty linen and wash the dishes, and prepare to make the bread for the wedding night. The owner of the house had lent my mother a big room and a big kitchen in the courtyard. So it was much easier.

After that night, we were very tired. Before going to bed, my mother asked my future husband to stay awhile. He answered: "Tomorrow she'll be my wife, I'll have time." My father shouted: "She's still my daughter and I'm still in charge," and he threw him out. I have to say that you came of age at twenty-one and I was barely eighteen.

Thursday morning, a dramatic turn of events: the fiancé's family finally agreed to join the celebration. In the afternoon, the civil marriage was celebrated at city hall, and then the religious wedding in the synagogue. Both buildings were on the same street, but a cortege of

several cars was nonetheless organized. From the synagogue, they went to the photographer. In the evening, they went back to the house, where another night of celebration took place.

My father-in-law was very happy, he was laughing. You could tell he was happy. But his wife made a long face. When we came back to the house, the musicians and everybody else came to us singing the song of the newlyweds, in Arabic, of course. They escorted us to our table. Then the people sat down around us. The night started out fine, with everybody happy. They started serving drinks, and there were more people than the night before. My father-in-law started drinking and that's normal, it was his son's wedding. My father-in-law was the nicest man, but when he drank, you had better not get in his way. And that's just what his wife did, she started getting on his nerves in front of everybody. She pulled his wallet out of his hands so he wouldn't put any money in the musicians' plate. He wanted to make up for the night before, he adored Arabic music. But you shouldn't get on his nerves, and his wife knew that very well. He kept on drinking, which didn't help things.

During this time, they started serving supper. When my father saw what was happening, he sat down on a chair. He didn't budge. My father-in-law kept on drinking, and she kept on insulting him in front of everybody. Then he started breaking everything he found. He started hitting people. Everybody was shouting and was scared. Some newlyweds took us to our room on the first floor while the brawl continued downstairs. One musician got a sprained wrist; another one sprained his ankle; a third got a black eye. It was five o'clock in the morning, you know. At that moment, my mother had had enough. She didn't want to interfere, thinking it was going to calm down. But when she saw that all the guests had been beaten up, she threw them out at six o'clock in the morning. They took the train to Constantine. It was Friday. He had the nerve to come up and knock on our door; he wasn't ashamed at all. People wanted to kill him. It was Friday. Nobody could sleep, we were all so sick with shame. We didn't dare look people in the eye. The whole family was there, and we had to prepare for Shabbat.

The next day, Saturday, my husband, accompanied by my cousins and my uncles, went to the synagogue. After prayers, the people in the synagogue and the rabbi came for the Shabbat prayer. I had put on the white gown again. The musicians, outside, called out to know if he [the father-in-law ] was still there. Everybody had some bruises. Of course, you'll tell me they were men, that they could have subdued him. But they didn't want to raise a hand against my husband's father, and everyone agreed on that.

We paid all the costs of the wedding before we left, except for the drinks. My two cousins had a café, and they bought the drinks wholesale, altogether nine hundred francs in those days. We wanted to pay, but my cousins said: "Keep your money. When you start working, you'll send it to us." That's what we did.

Even now, when I think of my wedding, I blush with shame.

Shrewd Bargaining

Aside from romance, these narratives demonstrate that marriage was a complex intrigue with multiple stakes that could produce an intense crisis. This crisis built and developed before the betrothal, culminated and was resolved during the final ceremonies. The bride and groom were not the only characters in the action. Parents intervened and so did other members of the family, relatives, matchmakers—a whole cast among whom the various roles were distributed. And the whole thing took place under the attentive, even prying, eye of the milieu to which the couple belonged.

Thus, to talk about one's marriage is to pull a myriad of strings that were knotted together when it was concluded. It is to talk of love and happiness but even more of the subtle transactions that were undertaken between the families.

Gabriel D., Salonika:

My father and mother got married through a family connection. How did they meet? It was through a matrimonial agency, they called it a go-between. . . . I'm looking for the

other word. . . . Here's the word in Spanish: izviterdige .^[2] The go-between had acquaintances among businessmen, workers—everybody. He'd go to see a family: "Here, I've got an offer for your daughter." The go-between might be a full-time matchmaker, but there were others, who were rental agents who didn't have a rich clientele, and sought extra business. They got a percentage, according to the family they approached. Then came the matter of the dowry. If the boy had a good job, the dowry was higher because, since the wife wouldn't work anymore and maybe wasn't even working then, the boy's parents demanded a dowry a little bit higher than they would have demanded for a clerk or somebody poorer. Then there was the matter of the trousseau. That, I would say, was essential. The trousseau was essential. The girl brought a trousseau according to the economic status of her family, a big trousseau or a little trousseau. Eight days before the wedding, the two families made a party. Family and friends were invited to this party because the girl had to exhibit the trousseau. A girl started making her trousseau before she grew up; once she was married, she started making the layette for the baby who was to come.

Tales of brokers and their clientele, of the commissions they earned from the deals they handled, of fierce negotiations over dowries and trousseaus (whose value varied with the "status" of the groom) clearly show that matrimonial transactions assumed an economic dimension. The subject of the investment represented by the dowry and the trousseau—the nightmare parents lived through when they had several daughters to marry off—recurs as a leitmotiv in many narratives.

Viviane B., Constantine, 1929:

It's my mother-in-law who came to ask for me in marriage. She knew that we were of modest means, since there was no father. My mother worked; so did I. She wasn't demanding. But in those days, at the time I got married, certain families demanded dowries. For me, there was no dowry. But my mother had already been making a trousseau for me since I was twelve years old. So when I did get married, I already had a

[2] A word we cannot identify.

pretty complete trousseau, and, to this day, I've bought almost no linens, sheets. All the linen in the house, the silverware, the dishes—everything was embellished with my initials. It was superb. But she did it with great difficulty. Ever since I was twelve, she had been collecting all that.

Manou B. (Aïn Beïda, 1926) suggests an interpretation of those practices and emphasizes the change in progress at the time she herself was married: in Constantine, in the 1940s, the salary of the young working wife replaced the dowry.

My mother, it was never the woman who had problems because she had daughters. While at that time, it was a catastrophe for a woman who had daughters, because you had to have a dowry. Why? Because quite simply the boys didn't all have means down there. Not much work, lots of unemployment. First of all, what could we do down there, us Jews? A Jew couldn't get a job in the administration as easily as he can today. A Jew was either a tailor or a barber or a shoemaker. And since they were big families, a shoemaker who needed an apprentice or a worker took his nephew or his son. So there just wasn't very much work. My brothers had to become barbers. But where could you work? There wasn't always work. That's why for a boy getting married, the only chance of getting ahead was to have a dowry and, with that dowry, to open a little shop.

For those women who had daughters, poor souls, it was a catastrophe because they had to come up with a trousseau and a dowry. That wasn't so in my case. Because my husband wanted me—not the trousseau and not the dowry. He was doing well. He was a grain dealer . . . and I was earning a good living. I was making eight thousand francs a month, in '45, that's seven or eight hundred thousand francs today [about one thousand dollars in 1985 ].

The economic stakes were not the only ones. There were social concerns as well. In fact, the successive stages of a marriage presented each of the two sides with a chance to evaluate its material and symbolic resources, to display them in public to one's friends and kinsfolk: for the amount of the dowry was known, the trousseau was displayed, and

the scope of the wedding celebration gave a measure of one's discretionary income. The quality of the bride's education and her upbringing would be read in her gestures, her words, her dress, the embroidery with which she herself perhaps had trimmed her trousseau. This gave friends and relatives the opportunity to assess the capital thus displayed, but they were also expected to participate in the event: to contribute their services during the preparation and the course of the celebration, to be an active presence at the various moments of the ritual, to offer payments to the musicians and gifts to the newlyweds, etc. Marriage thus engendered an exhibition and mobilization of the family's economic and symbolic capital. Suzanne T. could pride herself on having set "more than two hundred persons" in motion when she got married, despite the resistance of her in-laws, who, she emphasizes, did not contribute to the expenses. Everyone aimed at maintaining or improving a status, confirming or accelerating a social climb, and reinforcing a network of relations. Marriage was thus an expression of these social strategies, and, at the same time, it allowed their efficacy to be gauged.

One of the components of the symbolic capital was family "honor," which also had to be preserved. Remaining single for a long time brought more discredit to girls than to boys but it also affected the whole family; being single was considered a sign of imperfection, a taint perhaps, physical or otherwise. So the family had to arrange for its children while they were quite young. Once an alliance between two families was concluded—indeed, until the wedding—family honor could still be jeopardized by acts of impropriety on the part of the young people.

OK, we met each other, but hey, we weren't allowed to talk to each other. He made that clear, Alfred, my uncle! That I'm not ready to forget—the lickings he gave me. He could never—he wouldn't let us talk to young men. So we would have to sneak around; we went to the Petite Vitesse—that's a neighborhood—to talk to each other a little bit. And you'd think it was planned, somebody from the family would always catch me. It was something! At night, it never failed, I got a licking.

You know who saw me? It was Rica, my aunt. Oh, she'd go gallivanting around all the time with Alice. [Reine A., 1917,

Aïn Beïda. She thus had to wait eight years to get married, her fiancé's oldest sister not having found a husband.]

Family Order

Marriage aimed at reproducing the social order and, first of all, the family cell. Each union was to guarantee the continuation of the generations by the transmission, not only of the family name but also of first names and, with them, the renown attached to the line, or more precisely, to two lines, since each union sealed an alliance between two families. This is why in the chronicles of marriages it is the parents who speak first rather than the future spouses: parents "ask for" or "give" a daughter in marriage; they "want" and "take" a girl for their son. Parents have the first word, if not the last, in matrimonial negotiations. The desires and feelings of the future couple are asserted only if they suit the arrangements made by the parents. And what of the personal inclinations of the couple? That was to follow from "being from a good family."

Beyond the two family lines, a matrimonial transaction also concerned the community, a community with fluid outlines but for which every wedding guaranteed the continuity of Jewish life. Hence, that insistence on the endogamy of family or place that recurs in so many memories. Mathilde B. (Bizerte, 1892) and Suzanne T. (Sétif, 1910)^[3] both married first cousins. M. Z., born in Istanbul at the turn of the century, had lived in Paris since his early youth; but it is a first cousin from Istanbul whom he married in 1926. His contemporary, M., who came from Salonika to Paris in 1922, married his cousin, whom he brought from Salonika a few years later. Ida O., born in the same city in 1906, married a Salonikan Jew there; her older sister came to Paris before her but she married.

a Salonikan, yes. That is, a Salonikan but one who lived in France, here. He had come very young. He had lost his parents,

[3] The case of Suzanne T. shows that endogamy may not be a sufficient condition for parents: although she was her husband's first cousin, the latter risked losing or at least not gaining anything in social and symbolic status if he married a partner of modest means. Hence, the parents' obstinacy in fighting against that marriage. See p. 106 ff.

but his uncles were very rich. They had him brought here and raised him. They put him in a school run by monks. His name was Menahem. She married him. The other sister married a Sullam, from Salonika. The other one, the one who was deported, she married a Nefusi, also from Salonika.

Louise G., Aïn Beïda, 1921:

I had a young man from Tébessa. He was a relative of one of my aunts, from Aïn Beïda also. He was an orphan too. He lived in Tébessa. They sent him to Aïn Beïda to be introduced. And it's the truth, in that case it worked out well. I saw he was an orphan; I was an orphan myself. He was from Tébessa; I was from Aïn Beïda. We were distantly related, not very very much with him—on my aunt's side, the wife of my uncle, my father's brother. So it was almost done.

I was at my Aunt Cécile's. She was sick, in bed, and I was at her house. I got along with my Aunt Cécile. I had prepared for Saturday, Shabbat, and all of a sudden, we heard a knock at the door. I went to open it, and there was Uncle A., M.'s mother, Mother Y., and, if I'm not mistaken, Auntie A. Supposedly they came to see their sister. As far as I was concerned, it was perfectly normal since she was sick. Meanwhile, he showed up, that young man. He came on Saturday and on Sunday. Auntie Cécile said to me: "This afternoon, don't bother going out, you're going to stay here. Your uncle needs you."

[The girl insists on going out. In vain. ] My Uncle A. took me by the hand like a little baby and walked me around Aïn Beïda, explaining to me: "That's why we came, for your marriage. We don't want you to marry a stranger. You're the only daughter of our sister Baya. We don't want you to go away. You have to stay with us, among us. There's my sister's son. He's very good, he's this, he's that." In short, all that nonsense.

Listen, it's not worth it to try to understand. The A. family found out I was going to marry that guy from Tébessa, and they didn't want it. I said: "Uncle, it's not nice what you're doing now. I've got that young man. He was waiting the guardian—since he's an orphan—to come ask for me in marriage. The young man, he's there." And uncle says, "Don't

bother trying to understand. Here we are. We don't want you to go to Tébessa. We don't know what might happen."

"Was it far away, Tébessa?"

Maybe two and a half, three hours, that's all, by car. And it's nice, it's not like the buses from here to Paris.

They worked on me so much that I thought to myself: after all, they came for me, it's true—and I said yes. We were very modest. Here in Paris I don't think they would have done the same thing, it's not the same thing at all.

Alice B., Aïn Beïda, 1913, remained single:

My mother wanted to keep me with her. But I had offers from everywhere, even from Canada. A Canadian and an American. I'd be an aunt from America now or a Canadian aunt. Jews. When there were English, Americans, everywhere, in '42–'43, there were those two. One, who was called Daniel, the American, came every Saturday.

Just think! She didn't give me in Bône or Algiers and we're talking about her sending me to Canada or even America!

In a world and at a time when these Jewish communities were on the verge of rupturing and disappearing, their frontiers were still sharply defended.

Religion and Tradition

When Gabriel D. spontaneously approached the subject of his parents' marriage (p. 111), he immediately brought in the character of the go-between. Thus he moved imperceptibly from the narrative of a unique adventure to the recounting of the customs of his community. In the same way, the women of Aïn Beïda, Constantine, and Tunis take care to describe the rules of the game with a wealth of details, even when they didn't follow them. So, "I" illustrates what is done by "We," the community back home.

This insistence on the norm no doubt stems from the importance of the event in their own lives. Raised from childhood in the expectation of its realization and the terror that it might not happen, marriage for them was the major rite de passage, perhaps the only one. For men,

by contrast, birth was marked by circumcision and entry into adulthood by bar mitzvah.^[4]Besides, they could show their stuff outside the family milieu, in work, study, or even, from what we hear, in sport, the arts, and—why not?—adventure. No such opportunities existed for women. So their tales of the wedding and their marriage is like the proof that they have passed the test: that's what had to be done, that's what I did. At that crucial moment when they had to conform to tradition and thereby demonstrate their adherence to the community consensus, they fulfilled their role.

If women take so much pleasure in describing the wedding, it is also because it lends itself to a long, dramatic presentation, with costumes, music, and sets corresponding to each one of the acts of the drama. But as they recall the beauty of that show, these women indicate a distance with regard to practices fallen into disuse and now alien. When the lights of the party are extinguished and the noises disappear, the impression of excess remains—in the preparation of the trousseau, the requirement of the dowry, and the cost of the copper objects necessary for the ritual bath but useless once the marriage is celebrated. Yes, the memory of the excessive constraints imposed by the environment remains. Precisely because "that isn't done anymore" and "that might not be done anymore" are people so given to protracted descriptions.

What had to be done constituted the tradition. In the collected narratives, it was blended with religion. One's efforts to conform to the norms indicated one's respect for religious prescriptions. People don't seem to realize that the tradition was in fact a tradition, a version of local custom, which had no doubt changed over time and was devoid of meaning once it crossed the boundaries of the community. Quite to the contrary, local customs are presented as having an authentic and universal Jewish, and hence prescriptive, value. The descriptions of the whole wedding, lavish in their detailing of the social aspects of the celebration, ultimately say almost nothing about those elements in fact required by Jewish orthodoxy. The ketubbah^[5]is barely indicated, if at all; the kiddushin^[6]is completely absent. Only the ritual bath and the blessing

[4] In the collected memories, we do not find any mention of celebrations for the birth of a daughter. There were no birthdays, no ceremonies for piercing ears, and none marking puberty.

[5] Marriage contract.

[6] Delivery by the future husband of a pledge accompanied by a formula which binds the girl.

of the rabbi are inscribed here and there in the series of scenes we are shown. In most cases, people don't seem to realize either that the practices they describe bear strong resemblances to those of Muslim families. This assimilation of the Jewish religion to the most narrowly localized practice, already expressed in cooking or rituals, is found here with regard to other social practices.

Among other memories, that of Georgette D. (Tunis, 1899), which begins with a particular episode, slips into a general and prescriptive discourse and soon turns to a questioning of customs that have become exotic.

[Speaking of persons in her family ]: Her mother and father were neighbors. I was six years old when her parents got married. It happened just like weddings in those days, eh. There was what they call the hammam ushekh, where the bride was dressed in the local costume, with the teguia [headdress ], the bolero, everything. And all the girls were dressed like that. Then there was an oriental concert and a big party. Then there was the henna.

For hammam ushekh, you didn't go to the Turkish bath. Then, afterward, there was a Turkish bath for the girls: the night before the wedding, the bride went into the pool there, and they gave her the tbila [ritual bath ]. They put sugared almonds in her mouth and tbarkallah .^[7] They used to give those sugared almonds to girls so they'd get married fast. Did you know that?

Here the order of the events is confused; the string of memories is broken. She insists only on what seems anachronistic to her.

The bride's last shirt, they gave it to the girl they wanted to marry off next—the last shirt before getting dressed to get married, on the wedding day.

There was a showing of the trousseau on the last Saturday. Somebody, a child that is, from the groom's family went "to take" the hen from the bride's family's house. Then, they gave

[7] "God bless!" used here ironically. The fact that her description is addressed to someone who was not familiar with these practices contributes to distancing her from the tradition.

back half the hen. And the girls had the right to the wing, to both wings, yes. You wonder why it was a young child, who was always accompanied by an adult.

Yes, but there's something else that we didn't do for anybody except Henriette, because Madame S. [the groom's mother ] was a little . . . old-fashioned. Before beginning all the marriage celebrations, they sent a woman to the mother-in-law to tell her: "There, we decided to make the wedding. And the hammam ushekh will be on such and such a date, the henna on such and such a date, etc." So it was that woman herself who prepared the shebgha [dye and makeup ] for the henna. They said in Arabic: "We can open the wedding." You see, the translation is "to open the wedding." As if they weren't in agreement! [Laughter ]

The husband then takes up the tale, emphasizing again the strangeness of the practices.

Oh, you know what there was that was special, that made me laugh, it was taking the hairs off the face, the down. They did that, termertina . It's a wax—I don't know—it's sticky. It burns sometimes. And the person who did it smeared her fingers with the stuff and put it on the face and then she pulled it off. And you'd see the bride grimacing. It was done at home, before she went to the Turkish bath.

Speech breaks off; memory is disconnected. While giving a description of customs they thought immemorial and immutable, inscribed in the slow move of tradition, they tell—and become aware—of a break. Tradition has lost its meaning.