One question, though, kept flashing on an otherwise peaceful horizon: How and where would I prepare for the end of second-year oral exams and, mainly, for the third-year finals? The second-year orals were no major problem, thanks to the mimeographed lectures. As you were informed on which specific course you would be examined each day during the two-week exam period, it sufficed to memorize the lecture notes on the eve of each interrogation, regurgitate the answers the next morning, then forget everything you’d just studied and repeat the process for the following day’s exam. At that time my memory still functioned as it was expected to, and fatigue was overcome with pills the name of which I have since forgotten. When all was over, I fell ill from exhaustion, but within a few days I was back on my feet.
The end of the third year did not allow a repeat performance, as the exams were both written and oral and, except for knowing that they would cover the history of international relations, international law, and international economics, any topic that had been taught over the three years could come up. As chance would have it, about three months before the finals, the physician of the embassy, whom I visited for some minor complaint, had me x-rayed and found dark patches on the lungs that he interpreted as early signs of tuberculosis. He ordered three months of paid leave and full rest. A second opinion, which I sought on my own, did not confirm such an ominous diagnosis. I kept this second opinion to myself (after all, the embassy was responsible for a diagnosis by its own physician …) and took my three months’ pay.
I settled in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, a small town some forty minutes by local train from the Gare du Luxembourg. La Créssonière, a charming little inn, offered me full board for the money I could pay. Nearby, the ruins of the famous Jansenist convent of Port-Royal, where Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine had lived for some time, attracted tourists. My own inn was also well-known but differently: I soon discovered that it was a choice retreat for couples from Paris who wished to remain anonymous. I worked hard for three months and became ready for the finals.
The regular written and oral exams were no major problem, but then at the end came the most dreaded exam, the notorious exposé oral (oral presentation), a specialty of Sciences Po. You drew a topic from any of the subjects you had studied during your three years at the school, received half an hour to prepare, and then had to present it in front of a jury of three professors in exactly ten minutes (you were stopped if you went overtime). This was the “endgame” in a sense. It so happens that I drew a topic I had read about shortly beforehand: “The Institutional Structure of the British Commonwealth.” Today, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea.
By ordinary standards, I reacted strangely on receiving my Sciences Po results in the early summer of 1955: I had made it to top student (major) in Relations Internationales that year. However, instead of attending the “champagne reception” for the four majors of the year (one for each department), hosted by the director of the school, Jacques Chapsal, I went to a thé dansant (five o’clock tea with orchestra and dancing) somewhere on the Champs-Élysées. It took me some years to understand that strange behavior: I was probably so terrified of any success that I used quasi-magical rituals, not to cancel it, as I needed it like the air I breathed, but to welcome it and at the same time establish a safe distance. Over the years I acquired the almost automatic habit of belittling any achievements. In short — and please excuse the oxymoron — I became an artist in false modesty.
More importantly, my life could have changed there and then. Given my results, Michel de Boissieu, one of the adjunct professors and a very high official at the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (today “Paribas,” I think), offered me a position at the bank, one of the most important ones in France. It meant, among other things, becoming French almost automatically. I was duly grateful but rejected the offer. It did not occur to me to turn my back on Israel. However limited my desire to live in Israel at the time could have been, I felt inexorably attached to that country. In fact, however critical my present attitude may be, this sense of attachment is not yet extinguished.
3
Once back at the embassy, in the summer of 1955, I moved from the press department to the military attaché’s office, and again I was lucky. The military attaché, Colonel Emanuel Nishri, a French-trained officer, was a bon vivant with an eye for the ladies; he ruled his office like an enlightened monarch. Always spick and span — and very different from most Israeli officers, who, in that regard, exhibited a studied nonchalance — Nishri, when considering some trying issue, would puff at an inexhaustible pipe while exclaiming from time to time, “A scandal! A scandal!” (Bizayon in Hebrew). Nobody got upset.
On the other side of our three offices, you entered the domain of the air attaché, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Kedar: during the war, he had fought as a Royal Air Force pilot, stationed mainly in South Asia (Ceylon, I think). Paul, as I would soon call him, had not acquired British superciliousness. As at the Avnis, I was to become a frequent guest at the Kedars’ (Paul and his wife Ruthie).
Very soon after I joined my new post, a hectic period started. The special relations between Israel and France were tightening rapidly, and a constant stream of high-ranking Israeli officers and Defense Ministry officials visited Paris in what soon turned into preparations for a common operation against Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. In 1955, as Egypt controlled the straits of Sharm el-Sheikh, Nasser closed the Gulf of Akaba to ships sailing to Elath, the Israeli Red Sea harbor. In July 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, a waterway supposedly open to all shipping under international law, although Israel had been barred from using it since the creation of the state. The Soviet Union was sending military advisers and massive quantities of heavy military equipment to the Egyptians. We saw a short film secretly shot in the harbor of Alexandria: huge Soviet tanks were being disembarked and loaded on trailers by Egyptian crews. It didn’t bode well. Moreover, incidents between the two countries, mainly incursions by fedayeen from the Gaza Strip and Israeli retaliations, grew in number and scope.
As for the French, they believed that Nasser was helping the Algerian rebellion. In short, common interests between Israel and France were leading to preparations for common action. Moreover, the French prime minister Guy Mollet and his entire socialist government were friendly to Israel and set on helping the Jewish state against the growing danger from Nasser’s Egypt and its Soviet ally. The memory of Munich, the abandonment by France of a small state threatened by a powerful neighbor, remained strong.
As a symbol of the military rapprochement between the two countries, in early 1956 the commander in chief of the French army, General Maurice Challe, decorated the Israeli chief of staff, General Moshe Dayan, with the medal of Grand Officier of the Legion of Honor. We all attended the ceremony; it took place on a cold and rainy day in February in the courtyard of the École Militaire, the same courtyard where some sixty years earlier the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus was publicly stripped of his rank after having been (falsely) found guilty of treason because he was a Jew. And it was this blatant manifestation of anti-Jewish hatred that prodded the Paris correspondent of the Viennese Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl, to come up with the idea of fighting anti-Semitism by establishing a Jewish state.
What a sneer on the face of history! One cannot escape the fact that the Jewish state, which should have saved the Jews from a monstrous paroxysm of anti-Semitism, came too late. And one cannot help recognizing that, nowadays, the Jewish state contributes, not only by its misguided policies but by its very existence, to the surge of a new/old anti-Semitism. I often think of that tragic evolution, which, in part, is the background of my own life. Even in 1956, our “natural allies” in the French army (the government, as I said, was different) were friends of Israel, but no friends of the Jews.
Soon the British would join the secret alliance to reestablish control over the Suez Canal, but warily, and with persistent hostility toward Israel. Painful memories of the mandate period lingered in London, and while Prime Mi
nister Anthony Eden mainly worried about a negative reaction from the United States, Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd, who participated in tripartite talks near Paris (in Sèvres) in October 1956, was typically wary of Jews, and mainly of Israel (in the tradition of his predecessor, Ernest Bevin, and of the Foreign Office more generally).
The French were delivering Mystère (or was it already “Mirage”?) jet fighters, Ouragan fighter-bombers, as well as AMX tanks to Israel. The jets flew from a military airport near Paris (Villacoublay) to Bari in southern Italy and from there to Israel. We followed the landings in Bari over the phone. I suppose communicating in Hebrew was enough of a code for these occasions, even if some Soviet agents were listening. In any case, it didn’t remain secret for long, as within a few months the Suez campaign would start and all these French planes would then fly Israeli colors.
4
During all those years in Paris, not once did I bother to look for the places in which my parents and I lived after our arrival in April 1939. At that time, I had forgotten the name of the hotel where we spent our first weeks in France, along with the name of the street on which my parents had later rented a small apartment. But I clearly remembered the areas (Pigalle in the first case, Porte de Versailles in the second), and I certainly remembered the Jewish children’s home to which I was sent while my parents were learning some useful profession (my mother became a beautician and my father learned cheese making). I recall getting tied to a tree and beaten up by yarmulke-wearing boys for being a goy. The home was in Montmorency, scarcely beyond the northern suburbs of Paris. In short, I didn’t wish to reach beyond what I already knew. And what I knew did not weigh on me, or so I thought.
Nevertheless, during the years 1953 to 1956, I regularly met with people who knew my parents in Néris and now lived in Paris, particularly the Macé de Lépinay family, who, in 1942, had established the contact with the seminary, and the Chamboux couple, who had become close friends of my parents. The Macé de Lépinay family stayed regularly in Néris, where they had a pleasant secondary residence during the summer season. The husband, a physician, attended to patients who came for treatment to the spa; the water was supposedly beneficial for nervous disorders. Madame de Lépinay, a formidable lady, ruled over the local lending library, over her family, and over whoever came under her spell, like my father, her German teacher. She told me much later that she was born Jewish but converted to Catholicism early in life. That may have been a good reason for staying in Néris during the war. As for the Chamboux, they were both Communists; that, again, may have been a sufficient reason to choose our small town.
Somewhere, deep down, I may nonetheless have kept some traces of emotion. Thus, I went at least five times to see René Clement’s film Les jeux interdits (Forbidden Games), the story of a little French girl, Paulette, whose parents are killed during the débacle (the flight of millions of people ahead of the German advance). She finds shelter with a peasant family, where she falls in love with the son, Michel, approximately her age, about six. The idyll cannot last: a Red Cross delegate takes her away. As the crowd in a large refugee hall mills around, Paulette hears a voice calling “Michel!” The film ends as she shouts desperately, “Michel! Michel!” I cried each time.
5
I forgot to mention that when I left Paris for Saint-Rémy, Meir and I had to give up the apartment on rue Ampère, which was leased to us by the most eccentric landlord I ever encountered: a dowser. I wonder how many people still know what a dowser is; it so happens that I knew the word in French, un sourcier, and reached for the dictionary. A dowser discovers underground water, lost objects, and more by using a twig that supposedly vibrates the closer he gets to the object of his search.
From the spacious apartment on rue Ampère, I moved to a chambre de bonne (a maid’s room) on the sixth floor, under the eaves of an apartment building on boulevard Berthier. At the time — and possibly even today — housemaids lived in those tiny single rooms, with a sink in the room but common toilets at the end of the corridor. It was in such a room that my girlfriend Maryvonne, whom I met at Mimi Pinson, and I spent much time, and also where we later had to induce a hemorrhage in order for her to be admitted into a hospital and have an abortion. We both agreed on it: Maryvonne already had a son who lived with her parents; she didn’t want another child.
Abortions were strictly forbidden in France at the time, except if prior bleeding or any kind of related complication occurred. These were messy affairs: you had to call somebody, usually a midwife (whose phone number you kept, just in case), who would induce the bleeding for a substantial sum. I felt quite guilty, notwithstanding our agreement, a feeling intensified by my certainty that this relationship wasn’t going to last.
Two months before the beginning of the Sinai campaign (which started at the end of October 1956), I resigned from my temporary job at the embassy and left Paris for Sweden.
In the next two years, I would change countries three times again. Was I replicating the migrations of my childhood? Was I acting out geographically, so to say, the repeatedly shifting changes in my sense of identity? I don’t know. I only remember that, at the time, I was proud of my “lightness of being.” I liked living on the surface of things. Possessions, I had none; deep attachments to people, I hadn’t either. My commitment to Zionism was real, but I preferred it nonbinding as far as life in Israel went, so that I could quickly escape, if need be. Thus, at twenty-four, I was a luftmensch in the true sense of the word.
* * *
* Hard boiled egg with mayonnaise sauce; steak (rare) with fries; goat cheese; meringue with whipped cream.
† Steak with pepper sauce.
CHAPTER THREE
Sweden
To reach Saltå Arbetsskola, you take the train from Stockholm to Järna, via Södertälje; from there you can choose between a short drive or, on a nice summer day, a pleasant one-hour walk downhill. The school appears after the road turns sharply to the right (it is on flat ground by then): a cluster of small houses built in the typical red wood of Swedish country homes, surrounded by trees and, beyond them, by cultivated fields. If you look down the road, you will notice, about half a mile away, the dark line of a forest. After reaching the edge of the forest and climbing a gentle slope, the road winds down toward the waters of a sound and a ferry wharf.
The Saltå Work School (as its name could be translated) was (and maybe still is) an anthroposophical institution for mentally disabled boys from approximately age twelve to an undefined upper limit, as most of the patients would never be able to adapt to the outside world. Sometime in the 1940s, my uncle Hans Glaser became Saltå’s director. He had chosen Sweden, together with my maternal grandmother, in the fall of 1939.
1
By pure chance — but he would have objected to “chance” — Uncle Hans had become an anthroposophist in the early 1930s. His brother Willy (my mother had three brothers: Paul, Willy, and Hans), a chemical engineer, was returning home via Switzerland. As he had to wait several hours in Basel for the train connection to Prague, he decided to visit the world center of anthroposophy in nearby Dornach, mainly, I think, to see the peculiar architecture of the Goetheanum (the headquarters of the movement) designed by its founder, Rudolf Steiner. During the visit, he took some literature and left it lying around in the Glaser family home in Rochlitz; Hans discovered it, read it, and saw the light.
Steiner had founded anthroposophy on the eve of the First World War. The movement derived from Theosophy but seceded from it. Anthroposophy aims at spiritual enlightenment, achievable, according to Steiner, by a series of rational steps that can be scientifically validated. The movement became influential in introducing its methods and insights into education (it established its own schools, the “Waldorf schools”), special education, medicine, agriculture, and art.
I don’t know what Hans had read in the thirties and how far he had internalized Steiner’s teachings. Whatever the case may be, the Swedish anthroposophists — who probably helped him
get a visa for himself and for my grandmother — must have been sufficiently impressed by his commitment and also, probably, by his practical experience in agriculture and business, to put him in charge of the school in Järna.
Apparently my uncle did very well in his new position, and Saltå Arbetsskola also became recognized as something of a model institution by the Swedish health authorities. Some of its young residents came from state mental homes, others were sent privately. I’d visited the school for the first time in 1954, and liked it. After leaving my temporary job at the Paris embassy, I thought that Saltå would be a good place for pondering about a more permanent future. I informed my uncle and set off from the Gare du Nord: Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Malmö, Stockholm, Södertälje, Järna.
I would have to earn my keep. At first, I didn’t consider taking a job at the school and rather hoped to find something in Stockholm and come to Järna occasionally. I talked to people at the Dagens Nyheter (the Daily News) and at some commercial enterprises, all in vain. The two months’ salary that I had received upon leaving the embassy would not last for long. I enjoyed being down and out, sitting till late at night in a café at the Central Railway Station, watching the trains, eating my only meal of the day, a hot dog with a lot of mustard and a cup of coffee, basking in real, penetrating melancholia.
In October 1953, I had arrived in Paris with one suitcase that contained all my belongings, and here I was in Stockholm, three years later, with the same suitcase and all my belongings. In 1954, my uncle Paul had died of uremia following the botched operation I mentioned previously. Willy, who also lived in Nirah, took over Paul’s house, gave me some paltry sum — and that was it.
2
I returned from Stockholm to Saltå and joined the staff of caretakers (a few Swedes and some Germans). I started learning basic Swedish, and in the late fall of 1956 became a full-fledged orderly. That stay would become a significant, albeit short, episode in my life.
When Memory Comes Page 4