BUT FAR MORE TROUBLING THINGS were looming on the gray Antwerp horizon. The VMO, Flemish Military Order, host to the extreme right at Diksmuide, had been banned in the early 1980s and renamed itself the Vlaams Blok, the Flemish Bloc. It played down the SS service records of some within its ranks, and it prudently avoided anti-Semitic rhetoric—unless of course you drank beer with its members at Diksmuide. Their public speeches, like those of the German Republicans, Dutch Centrum, and French National Front, concentrated on the “immigrant problem”—the claim that the quality of life in the nation was being eroded by the presence of Moroccans, Turks, and Arabs. This approach seemed to settle much better with the general population than attacking Jews, a polemic that was associated with Nazis and occupation. In the general election of November 1991 the Vlaams Blok won 25 percent of the vote in Antwerp. This was a shock in a city where they had won only 1.9 percent in the previous election four years earlier, and where there were few notable conflicts between the general population and the highly visible Jewish four percent. The strongest negative feeling commonly expressed about Jews was that they were dangerous to be around because they could be targets. A swimming instructor said that people shied away from the pool on Sundays when the Orthodox Jewish children were offered instruction, because they feared that someone might attack the pool.
Palestinian attacks seemed fresher in Antwerp memories than the Holocaust. The Jewish Community was spending considerable money on security operations against possible future incidents. But it did not expect those attacks to come from the extreme right. The Community was still focused on Arabs. On a few occasions North African juvenile delinquents had singled out Jews for physical attacks. But the Jews were disturbingly passive about the fact that a quarter of their city had voted for a racist right-wing party. When Mechilem Silberman said he did not feel entirely safe in Antwerp, he could not even name a reason why he felt that way. Sam Perl pointed out that Antwerp Jews had not had any problems with the extreme right. “They say that they have nothing against Jews. We are glad to hear it, but we don't trust them.” Aside from this sad lack of solidarity with other minority groups that were being attacked by the extreme right—partly influenced by difficult relations between the Jews and some of the groups being victimized—there was a curious naive confidence among Antwerp Jews that the Flemish extremists would not dare turn against them. Perl said, “The Flemish are afraid to go out openly against us. If they go out openly against us, they will lose part of their votes.”
Part of the problem was that the Jews had once again become a happy and prosperous community, and strolling down the Belgielei on a Shabbat, it was possible to forget that there ever had been a Holocaust. Survivors did not want to remember, but they knew they could not let the rest of the world forget, and for this reason in the 1990s Perl began speaking about his experiences. He was not able to dismiss the historical revisionists with the same optimism with which he shrugged at the Flemish nationalists. People were being published who said it was all a lie, that the Holocaust had never happened, and that meant that Perl could no longer keep his nightmares to himself. In February 1993 he spoke for the first time about his Holocaust experiences, torture, and his two escapes from deportation. This was not an intimate conversation in his home but a lecture to forty students. “I feel that we have to come out and witness now. My story is nothing compared to those of the people who have been in Auschwitz. Nevertheless, I have my part also.”
Though he was born after the war, the Holocaust remained on Mechilem's mind also. If nothing else, his mother would have kept it there. After the fall of Communism an influx of illegal Poles came into Belgium. Everyone in Antwerp was hiring Polish cleaning women. Mechilem saw a television interview with a Belgian official who, asked about all the illegal Poles in Belgium, said, “What can I do if the Jews keep giving them work?”
Mechilem told his wife, “I will mop myself, but I don't want Poles in my house!” They hired a Yugoslavian. “I'm not sure if that's better,” he said. People would come into his store with stories about the Poles, how they would switch dishes or slip traif, unko-sher food, into the pot. They did not trust Poles because they thought they still hated Jews. “They call us all rich and greedy,” someone said to Mechilem.
“And in Poland,” it was pointed out, “there are only a few Jews that haven't been killed or driven off. And the Poles are still anti-Semites even without the Jews. They want to get those few.”
“See,” said Mechilem, “the Poles are greedy.”
31
In Paris
ANDRE JOURNO FUMBLED IMPATIENTLY WITH HIS CIGAR-trimmer and snipped the tip of his long hand-rolled Havana. He thrust it into his mouth and then took it out as though too exasperated to even smoke. “It's shameful. Shameful, absolutely disgusting, no shame.”
It was the tenth anniversary of the gun attack on Goldenberg's, a day that he had told countless reporters over the years, “We must always remember.” The first few years, journalists would work Rue des Rosiers, and when they got to him, he liked to say something about how the day must always be remembered. But this year, they weren't even asking him. They had a television crew down at Goldenberg's filming some special, and that was all. “It's just shameful the way he's exploiting that tragedy to get himself publicity. That is all I have to say.”
By 1990, the Marais had taken over the Pletzl. All that was left of the Pletzl was the Rue Pavee synagogue, a few shtibls, a center the Lubavitchers had set up on Rue des Rosiers, a few kosher butchers, some bookshops, Goldenberg's, the several shops of the Journo family, and the three bakeries of the Finkelsztajn-Korcarz family. And there was one old-time barbershop, whose owners, being the only non-Jews in the neighborhood, had witnessed the roundups and deportations throughout the occupation.
These remnants were surrounded by the chic, the trendy, and the American. In the 1980s, just as the refurbishing of the Marais was largely completed and ready to sell and Paris real estate prices had become inaccessible to most, the dollar became strong against the franc and Americans felt that they were getting bargains. The Marais became a neighborhood of gay bars and fashionable restaurants, where the language lingered halfway between French and English. Signs went up for “le Brunch de Dimanche” where no one had even eaten Sunday breakfast before. Lingerie and jewelry shops replaced old Pletzl shops.
The Journos had expanded. In 1989, Andre's father, Roger, died, and his mother decided to retire and sold the little grocery. Andre bought a bigger store, then expanded it into a store and restaurant. Another brother started a cafe across the street from Goldenberg's, and another sister had a food store. They all lived on Rue des Rosiers and raised their children there. On Friday nights Andre closed his restaurant and shoved all the tables together into one long table set with roasted peppers, pickled vegetables, and chal-lalis. More than a dozen Journos with their teenage children sat around and said the blessing for the candles and the wine, the men putting their paper napkins on their heads for the blessing. That was their only religious concession before they settled into the family Friday-night couscous. Outside, Orthodox Jews were scurrying to their shtibls, and young couples were strolling, looking for the newest restaurant, wondering what sort of silly party they were passing with the men all putting paper napkins on their heads.
Andre also had an art gallery with paintings of behatted Orthodox life that did not seem to attract much interest from the Orthodox but drew some tourists, who expected this kind of thing in the Pletzl. The gallery was in Finkelsztajn's building, and the restaurant was directly across the street from Henri's store. Henri, who had never really wanted to be a baker, now had family and employees and was functioning largely as a host. He greeted people at his store, especially old-time customers. He gossiped. He would find a day-old challah and put it in a bag, silently drift out in the street, and hand it to a beggar without ceremony. He wandered.
He had bought back the old bakery with the blue tiles at the corner of Rue des Ecouffes, and
it was now run by his son Sacha. They had the kind of working relationship that Henri had enjoyed with his own father. When Sacha was 12 he had gone to a summer camp, where he fell in love with a girl, Florence, from the twentieth arrondissement. She was from a Jewish family, and her mother's grandfather had owned a shop selling religious articles on Rue des Rosiers. But the grandfather had been deported and killed, and after the war the family had settled into a more affluent part of Paris. After summer camp ended, Florence and Sacha did not see each other again, because they lived too far away for twelve-year-olds to visit each other, and their parents wouldn't let them take the metro. That dewy, dry-throated, forever-and-ever twelve-year-old first love was left to fade.
Twelve years passed, and Florence happened to visit Rue des Rosiers and saw a bakery called Finkelsztajn's. She started asking questions. Sacha and Florence were married three years later, in 1985. In 1986 they had a daughter. While Sacha ran the store on Rue des Ecouffes, Florence ran Henri's store, In 1992 she had triplets, two girls and a boy. A long-range planner, when the children were still infants, Florence had already spoken to a rabbi about doing two bat mitzvahs and a bar mitzvah on the same Saturday.
Henri, with all this commerce and family, had taken on a contented look as he drifted between the cash register and the deli-counter in the bakery. Down the street, Sacha was in charge of non-bakery food—several kinds of herring and different dishes with cheese and spices, and liver, all with the old Yiddish names. As in Antwerp, the Poles who came to Paris after the fall of Communism headed straight for the Jewish neighborhood looking for work. Poles worked for Henri and Jo Goldenberg and any of the Ashke-nazim still in the Pletzl. Henri was amused by the irony of it, but on the other hand, after a lifetime of being told he was from Poland, he was at last getting to observe some Poles first-hand.
Finkelsztajn's favorite thing was when new customers hovered uncertainly over the platters. He explained that they could buy by the gram or in a sandwich. But before they decided, he would tell them that they must try everything. Taking little pieces of bread, he would carefully spread samples on each, handing them one by one to the customer who tasted and moaned with approval while Finkelsztajn smiled his warm, easy smile, a happy man in his trade. He had never wanted to bake bread, but feeding people and listening to them purr was a trade for Henri.
Although everything American had become fashionable in the Marais, Americans were starting to annoy him. When they spoke Yiddish they always used the familiar form. Always “Vos makhst du” for “How are you” and never “Vos makht ir?” And in any language Henri was tired of the line, “Just looking”—because they really were just looking. American Jews who had heard there was something Jewish on Rue des Rosiers went to have a look. They examined the small shop and stared up at the mid-nineteenth-century curlicues on the ceiling, and they walked out without buying anything, but what was worse to Henri, without saying anything. If he said something to them, they replied, “Just looking.” Then they walked out, crossed the street, and standing in Front of Journo's, they would snap a photograph of Henri's ocher-colored storefront with the scrapes and chips from trucks that tried to go up on the sidewalk to pass parked cars on the narrow street and didn't quite make it. “The Americans come here as though this is a museum and we are not real people,” Henri complained.
He drifted out of the shop, into the narrow street, and found people to chat with or things to watch. If nothing else, he could watch the oversized trucks scraping away his paint. Andre Journo was often running nervously between his restaurant and his art gallery, a cigar clenched in his mouth. The spry, tightly wound Mediterranean would fly past the dreamy, heavyset Central European. Their paths crossed a few dozen times every day. But they seldom had as much as a nod for each other. It was not about the difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. It was about real estate.
In French law, owning a commercial space and owning the walls to that space are two separate transactions. Icchok Finkelsztajn, with the money loaned to him by friends in the Pletzl, had only been able to buy the space for his bakery. Henri had later tried to buy the walls, but by then the owner would not sell because he wanted to sell the entire building. The building was run-down, and the tenants were paying 80 francs for an apartment. When the Journo family lived there, they had paid 60 francs. The owner earned barely enough to maintain the building. In 1980 he happily unloaded the building to someone interested in the real estate market. The new owner slowly drove his tenants out and restored the building, selling off the apartments at more than $2,000 a square foot.
At this point Journo had seen an opportunity to get control of the building and asked Finkelsztajn to go into business with him. Henri, by instinct, could not imagine having nervous, fast-talking Andre Journo as a business partner and declined. Managing on his own, Journo got the art gallery on the ground floor and the Arab cafe next to it when the owner retired and went back to North Africa. Then, in the spring of 1992, to Henri Finkelsztajn's astonishment, he discovered that Journo now owned the walls to his bakery and wanted him out.
The wall owner can evict the space owner at any time by buying out his space. If Journo did this to Henri, he could renovate the space and sell a luxury apartment “in the heart of the Marais.” Because the ground-floor storefront was not well-suited for an apartment, Finkelsztajn was able to talk Journo into taking over only the upper space where Henri had grown up. It was now kitchen space, and losing it meant that he would have to go back to baking in the basement. Almost a half-century after Icchok had sealed up the basement, declaring, “Working in a basement is slavery,” Henri had to reopen it and once again move the hot ovens down below. The bakery ceiling had to be propped up with steel while the work overhead shook the building. And then the Journos moved into what the Rue des Rosiers gossip mill reputed to be the most spectacular luxury apartment in the entire Marais.
EVEN PHYSICALLY DETERIORATING from Parkinson's disease, Chaim Rottenberg poured enormous energy into building his Orthodox community. When Daniel Altmann joined the community, his was one of fifty families. But by the 1990s, a decade later, more than three hundred families were directly involved, and some thousand families followed the leadership of the Rue Pavee synagogue. On a Saturday morning, the tall, elegant, art nouveau chamber was filled with men wrapped in their white prayer shawls, swaying and bobbing and bowing like frenetic bearded angels, periodically resting and gossiping with friends, the Hebrew chanting sometimes barely audible over the conversations in French and Yiddish. Occasionally, a thumping noise from the bimah would uselessly try to hush them, while their children ran and wrestled in the aisles and the women chatted and prayed high up on the balcony. The children covered their heads with major league baseball caps and ran playfully between the men's prayer shawls and took turns to see who could jump high enough to touch the mezuzah on the doorway. It was a large, lively, noisy community.
To a great extent, this was the work of Rottenberg's own charisma and energy. But it continued to grow after he fell sick. There seemed to be an increasing demand for this kind of old-fashioned Orthodox community. Many of the people in it, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic, were, like Daniel Altmann, people who had turned away from a secular life. For Altmann it had to do with a need, in modern French society, to feel a sense of belonging, of not being alone. “You have this development in French society,” he said. “People want to put themselves somewhere. You are linked, or you are not linked. But also, it's like a snowball. When you have a very strong center, things start to grow.”
The community had a committee of elders, and Rottenberg got the idea of putting some younger men on the committee. He had built a diverse community with many younger people, and he wanted them represented too. Altmann became one of two younger men on the committee. Then he became the vice president, then the president died. “You be the president,” declared Chaim Rottenberg to Daniel Altmann. Daniel tried to protest, said that he was too young, that he had young children to worry about, th
at he didn't want to get embroiled in “shtibl politics.” But no one ever could say no to Rottenberg. Altmann became president. After this, he had Rottenberg to contend with on a daily basis. The telephone would ring at the Altmann house. It was the Rav. He had asked Daniel to raise some funds for a certain project, and a week had gone by and he had not done it. “You didn't do it because you have money and you think you don't have to do things because you are rich? You think it is some small thing? Not important! Here, I will put up fifty francs, and I want you to put up fifty francs! I don't understand! You are ruining this whole thing!”
Altmann spent years being shouted at by Rottenberg. But he also knew him as a compassionate man. He called him a dinosaur, “the last of the man alone who can hold together a whole community.” And while Daniel pursued his religious life, his chemical trading business prospered. Like his grandfather, he found good opportunities in barter arrangements with a disintegrating Russia.
In 1990, Rottenberg's wife Rifka had a hip replacement operation and was hospitalized for two months. When she was released, Rottenberg's severe face smiled. “You're back,” he said, and suggested they take a vacation together to Switzerland. He died while they were away, and their son Mordechai took over the community. “We went on vacation. Then he died,” said Rifka with a laugh she had that seemed almost like crying. “That's life. But I found fifty years, because I was dead once already.”
PARIS BECAME the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world and the most important in Europe. Although there were an increasing number of Daniel Altmanns, French Jews still tended to assimilate. About a third of Paris Jews considered themselves to be “religious,” although many nonreligious Jews had strong Jewish identities. Florence Finkelsztajn said of her education plans for her four children, “I want them to learn the tradition, not the religion.” But a third of French Jews were marrying non-Jews, although French society continued to point out the futility of assimilation. Mitterrand's first government contained a number of very assimilated Jews, including Lament Fabius, who had a Catholic education and took communion. But when the government was announced, the French talked of the “Jewish government,” and when Fabius later became prime minister, he was “that Jewish prime minister.”
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