Exodus, Revisited

by Deborah Feldman

  As I looked at the various works produced by Richard and his peers, I recognized the experience of marginalization and alienation as strong themes, and I was touched in a way I had not previously experienced in my visits to contemporary art museums. This kind of new old art reminded me of how I still insisted on filling my bookshelves with the literature of long-dead authors, while each season brought a new cornucopia of contemporary titles that I often had trouble telling apart, as they all seemed to echo one another in style and approach. In many ways I hungered for a past I still felt anchored to, a past in which artists’ individual voices were more distinct from one another, braver in their search for the truth, clearer in their depiction of it.

  In the end, Richard had become one of Odd’s best and most renowned students. The work he produced under Odd’s tutelage went on to gain international attention and catapulted him into a world where collectors and art critics fawned over him and galleries competed to display his work. It was a sharp contrast to the tepid reception Richard had experienced in his early days, when his ideas were dismissed because he lacked the credibility of education and parentage. I identified strongly with this reinvention, as I saw it. Both of us had experienced sudden and complete transformations in our lives; I too had burst onto the literary scene completely unprepared and did not quite know what to do with my success.

  Richard had stayed with Odd for an unusually long time, traveling with him to his estate in Norway and then back to Paris, and during this time they slowly developed an intense master–student relationship. Odd had then entrusted Richard with his estate in France for three years, during which time Richard had painted furiously. By the time I met him, he was avidly preparing for several exhibitions, all scheduled to take place within a three-month period. He invited me to join him on a trip to his upcoming show in Paris. I had never before considered actually traveling to Europe. It had always felt like a place in a fairy tale, a mythical realm. But I did not hesitate to accept the invitation.

  After dropping Isaac off at his dad’s for the Passover holiday, I boarded a plane with Richard. I remembered when I had met Eli for the very first time, nearly seven years ago, on the day we got engaged; he had told me about taking a trip to Europe with his father and his many brothers, about how they had traveled across the continent by van, stopping only to visit the grave sites of rabbis strewn across Europe, where they would place stones on the tombs, light candles, and pray. I had been horrified to hear that on a trip like that he had not seen anything but graves. We had talked about going back there ourselves, but that had never happened. I had mistakenly assumed that he shared my desire to see the world, but in the end, he didn’t have any interest, and that was what had prevented him from any forays beyond the cemeteries—not the lack of his father’s permission.

  But it was also true that Eli never understood my obsession with that faraway point of origin, one that every family in our community could be traced back to. For the people who had raised him had been born in America and did not speak of it. Only I had been raised by someone from that first generation, someone who remembered the Old World and the way things were before everything changed. And although my grandmother had always been convinced that there was nothing to go back to, I knew I needed to see that for myself.

  I did not know then, when I first emerged into the golden light of the city of Paris, that it would be the first of many trips, that I would develop an unexplainable addiction to this entire continent that would consume me until I finally submitted wholly to its call. I still thought of it as a brief fling then, a romantic affair to be had and then released, with only the rosy memories lingering onward. Even then I looked at the city with hungry eyes, as if I would never see it again.

  Every American comes to Paris and feels small, I’m sure of it. We’ve been taught that the French do everything better than us, and no matter how carefully I’d selected my wardrobe for the trip, or studied up on the gender of French nouns, I knew my Americanness was clear and conspicuous, and I felt inferior. I envied Richard his command of the language, the way the words rippled as they tripped off his tongue, the way he even seemed to have adapted the body language and facial mannerisms of Parisians. I imagined he blended in completely. Years later, after I had been living in Berlin for five years, we would reunite once again at a Paris café. I realized then that his French was rendered nearly incomprehensible by his American drawl, and I marveled at my own grasp of the basics, which seemed to have sunk in as if by osmosis. But by then I would be a European. Now I felt overwhelmed by the weight of this continent, where everything was terribly strange yet somehow exactly right.

  We strolled through wide boulevards, Richard tilting his head up toward the sun, his hands tucked casually into the wide pockets of his linen pants, looking for all the world as if he was at home here, while my head ricocheted from side to side as I tried to take in every detail. A part of me felt the most simple, childish thrill when I thought of my younger self and imagined telling her she’d be strolling down the Champs-Élysées one day. Why, she wouldn’t have even been able to pronounce the name of the street!

  Soon we descended into the cool tunnels of the RER station, where we boarded the commuter train that would take us to Maisons-Laffitte. When we emerged into the downtown area of this famous horse-racing suburb, I recalled it was the place where Hemingway went to gamble in his memoir, A Moveable Feast. This town did not look all that different now from how he had described it. Here there were no sidewalks, only unpaved ground; horse’s hooves marked the depressions in the grass. Magpies pranced fearlessly in the green, and dandelions grew at the borders of gated estates.

  Odd’s estate was on a beautiful wide street, from which one could see across the Seine to the hills on the other side. Only his self-portrait, overlaid on a ceramic tile, marked the address—there was no name on the bell. The gates swung open slowly for us, and we walked down a path bordered by lush trees into a small clearing from which the house was finally visible, a grand château with shrubs and trees growing with wild abandon all around.

  Inside, the house had been emptied of furniture. In each opulent, high-ceilinged room, Odd’s work had been hung; a tour of the entire house yielded a veritable lifetime of achievements. Although Odd was in his atelier in Berlin for the duration of the exhibition and would only be returning tomorrow to organize the transport of the work at the closing of the show, his four children, two sons and two daughters, milled about providing guests with information or a glass of champagne. They were all in their teens, with glowing skin, Scandinavian bone structure, and ethereal blue eyes.

  I walked from room to room, my high-heeled footsteps echoing on the stone floor. The work was mesmerizing; up close, its power to transform put all those books I’d leafed through to shame. I had become fascinated with Odd’s work too, at this point. In real life, he was essentially exiled from his home country, after being dogged by political accusations of tax fraud. The Kitsch community was convinced this was a ploy to suppress a critical voice. It was clear to me, looking at his paintings, that Odd was certainly different in his worldviews than anyone else I had ever encountered. In one painting, a group of primitive-looking people sat and chewed on the limbs of a human corpse lying nearby, the landscape behind them a stony wasteland against an ashy sky; the implication was of a world too barbarian for ethical rules, or the performance of them, to hold water.

  Soon the guests were asked to gather in the main room, where a composer from Avignon named Martin Romberg had prepared a concert for the evening. A cellist and a pianist started to play, and as they reached the high notes, I could hear the return calls of chirping birds in the dusk. Just then, I looked around me at the crowd of people that had gathered, and I realized suddenly, with a lurch in my gut, that the house was full of Aryans, with angular bones and fair coloring, as my grandmother always described. Norwegians, Swedes, Austrians, Germans—of course the people most likely to be interested i
n Odd’s work would be those ethnically related to him. My heart started to race. Was I the only Jew here? I wondered. Had anyone noticed? I fled the house in a panic, trying to slow my breathing in the dim light of the outdoor terrace. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just be a person among people? Was it all an illusion, one that had been planted in me, or was it real? I asked myself. And more important, how could I ever know for sure?

  We slept in the apartment of one of Richard’s patrons, I on a red velvet sofa in a study lined with artwork, he on an air mattress in the living room. The next day we headed to Odd’s house again, this time to welcome him back from Berlin. The inner circle had gathered in the kitchen to prepare dinner. Kristoff, the Austrian who showed Odd’s work in his Oslo gallery, and Helene, his wife; David, a Kitsch painter from Venice; and some of Odd’s more prominent students. Bork, Odd’s eldest son, milled about in an expensive-looking suit. I was not much use in the crowded kitchen, so I made my way into the grand sitting room, where my favorite of Odd’s pieces was hung: Volunteer in Void, a figure suspended in a mythical galaxy. As I perched on the edge of a trunk, contemplating the large work, Aftur, Odd’s only brunette daughter, entered the room.

  She approached me and in halting English asked, “It is true that you are Jew?”

  I froze. I felt at once accused and singled out, but also as if a small and delicate bird had accidentally landed on my finger and I must not scare it away. “How did you know?”

  “Um, because of your nose?” Aftur said innocently, asking if she got it right.

  “Who told you that Jews have noses like mine?”

  “My father. My siblings always called me the Jew, because I have brown hair.”

  Aftur looked like Liesl from The Sound of Music, with straight-edge razor-sharp cheekbones, a delicate jaw, and piercing blue eyes. Her teeth shone like pearls in two neat rows when she smiled, a dimple just barely emerging from one hollow cheek.

  “You don’t look Jewish to me at all,” I said, laughing. “So take comfort in my expert opinion.”

  “My father is one-eighth Jewish,” Bork informed me, joining the conversation suddenly. Trembling with excitement as he spoke, he told me that when he was in school, his peers often called him a “fucking Jew.” He said this to me as if to equate his experience with mine, as if it was the common ground we shared.

  “Yes,” his younger brother, Øde, chimed in, “and then they tell us to get gassed.” He said this rather chummily, as if we had all been through some charming rite of initiation and now belonged to some special, exclusive club.

  Myndin, the youngest daughter, all platinum blond tresses and translucent complexion, piped in as well, asking, “Is it true you grew up Orthodox?”

  “Yes,” I answered once again.

  “I saw a movie about that,” she said eagerly.

  “Oh really? Which one?”

  “Witness.” And she smiled, as content as a cat waiting to be petted.

  I explained the difference between Jews and the Amish, in slow, deliberate English so that Myndin would understand. The situation devolved into a barrage of questions about Hasidic Jews from all of Odd’s children. In the middle of it all, Odd and his wife, Turid, arrived; I heard them clattering into the front hall. Soon, Turid was standing at the edge of the circle, listening, asking questions. Odd barreled in and out of the room at intervals, his dramatic, Harry Potter–like robes gathering the dust on the floor. “I hear you are quite the rebel,” he said as we were introduced. “You are the wandering Jew!” He lifted his fist as if to demonstrate some icon, like the Statue of Liberty.

  I remembered the Norwegian family we had met at Richard’s gallery. The daughter was a painter studying with Odd; the grandmother had once been a very successful artist in her own right, she told me, but had retired. She had reached out to caress my face, and I had flinched slightly at the invasion, although I didn’t draw away, perhaps because I had been taught as a child to endure many cheek pinches from elderly women.

  “You are a Jew?” she had asked then, in an almost adoring manner.

  I had chuckled uncomfortably and drawn away from her hand. “How can you tell?” I had asked sarcastically.

  “You have such a beautiful Jewish face,” she’d said. “When I was a child, I had a Jewish friend, but we had to smuggle her over the border during the war and I never saw her again.” Her eyes glazed over as if she was remembering something distant yet burdensome.

  These episodes would be the first of many I was to encounter during my visits to Europe. It struck me then as strange that this fetishizing of my Jewishness felt no different when it was ostensibly positive than when it came in the form of ignorance and anti-Semitism. Everyone wanted to define me by my Jewishness, while I struggled to define myself outside of it. Each time I thought I had arrived at a consensus, someone would come along with a comment like that, and I would lose my carefully constructed balance. It was a precarious identity at best, this one that I was building.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later the next day I found myself in a café by the Arc de Triomphe, gazing at the enormous empress trees leading up to the Place Charles de Gaulle, which were in resplendent pinkish-purple blossom. As I finished my café sans lait, I felt a lump in my throat, remembering how my grandmother thrilled to the blossoming trees each spring, calling out their names as we passed them, explaining to me what made each species unique and special. Cedar was prized for its aromatic wood, acacia for its delicate yet strong leaves. An occasional linden tree would remind her of Europe. How she would have loved Paris, I thought. How sad that she never got a chance to visit.

  When I was a child, I had watched my grandmother light the traditional Jewish yahrzeit candle every morning on the same table, where it would burn for twenty-four hours, until the next one was lit. It was a grieving custom, but in this case the expression of it was subversive. It was not permissible to mourn relatives who had passed so long ago—Jewish law limited the mourning period to a maximum of one year. After that it was considered imperative that the grieving move on; after all, one had to accept God’s will. But my grandmother never stopped lighting those candles, and although she claimed that they were for this one or that one, I knew that the one flame represented the souls of her entire family, from her two-year-old baby sister to her seventeen-year-old brother, all of whom had been gassed in Auschwitz.

  I looked up at the blossoming trees, the petals luminous in the sunlight, and asked myself, would my grandmother have even wanted to visit Paris? No matter how eloquently and nostalgically she talked about Europe, not once did I hear her express a desire to revisit. Was it all burnt landscape for her, a wasteland of murdered souls and spilled blood? Or did she feel rejected by Europe, in the sense that it had spit her out and sent her to America, refusing to recognize her birth as legitimate?

  Either way, here I was, struggling with a portion of what she must have struggled with, feeling at once rejecting, rejected, and at home. It was a dizzying emotional cocktail, and I felt that something had been stirred within me.

  4

  WURZELN

  ROOTS

  Four months later I found myself in Paris again, having dinner with a young opera singer who wore a silver Star of David around her neck. I had met Milena through a group of Yiddishists in New York. Jewish herself, with a Moroccan father whose family had been rescued by Berbers during the war, and a Polish Ashkenazi mother also raised by survivors, she was conscious of the past without having any direct access to it, and had studied Yiddish as a way to connect to her heritage. Now she was preparing a performance of old Yiddish melodies and needed help with their reconstruction; hearing that I would be in Paris, she asked if I wouldn’t mind singing them into a recorder for her.

  The day after I arrived was the first night of Rosh Hashanah, and Milena took me to a Masorti synagogue (Masorti being the European equivalent of C
onservative Judaism) for evening prayers. The rabbi was an Alsatian Jew, it was necessary for her to explain, because he, along with his wife and children, had a shock of platinum blond hair and pale blue eyes that I had never before seen in a Jewish community. They looked like a family of Scandinavian supermodels, not Jews. Meanwhile, some of the other attendees were of Moroccan ancestry, and the congregation alternated between operatic Ashkenazi prayer intonations and warbly melodies evocative of the Maghreb.

  Milena did not speak English well, and I did not even speak tourist French very well yet, so we mostly communicated in Yiddish. It was my native language, but I had not spoken it since leaving, and pulling it back out from the depths of my memory where I had buried it, thinking it was permanently out of use, felt almost unnatural. But Yiddish was the birth language of the woman who raised her, Milena told me, one she had been studying for three years in private classes. Other Jews desired to be assimilated and indistinguishable from the other Parisians, but Milena didn’t care about being indistinguishable, she said. She wanted to know who she really was; she wanted permission to be proud of it.

  When the rabbi delivered his sermon in French, Milena leaned over every so often to deliver a summary of his points in whispered Yiddish. The other congregants eyed us curiously. I could tell that Yiddish wasn’t spoken much around them. It had once been the language of these people, but it had gone the way of the ghetto, been obliterated from the European map. Only a dozen people were attending the service on that Rosh Hashanah, arguably the most important Jewish holiday of the year. Even the most lax of Jews show up at the temple to pay their respects on this holy day. I surmised that Paris simply didn’t have many Jews left, and I wasn’t exactly surprised, as I had always expected Paris to be a city wiped clean of Jewish remnants—in fact, it was something I had anticipated of all of Europe. My beliefs were only being confirmed.