5
The books I read during my first years in Israel should have expressed the various facets of my fragmented cultural self. They did not. Although I somewhere found Eugène Fromentin’s novel Dominique, that was more or less all the literature in French I got hold of in my new surroundings (I don’t remember when I first read Le Grand Meaulnes; it probably was in my Parisian lycée). At some point and for a very short while, I started reading in Hebrew, not mainly Israeli literature, but translations: Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, in short the “great books.” I should add nonetheless that I managed to read S. Y. Agnon’s Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday) in Hebrew, no small achievement.
I truly loved the “great books,” but this wasn’t the literature that I devoured during those years. My English was good enough and public libraries supplied me with novels and plays by writers mostly forgotten nowadays — Charles Morgan, Louis Bromfield, A. J. Cronin — but also by some who haven’t yet fallen into complete oblivion like Somerset Maugham and J. B. Priestley. And, there was Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, and Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley. Sometimes, I reached even higher: Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure, as well as Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Letters to a Young Poet.
Don’t misunderstand me; I didn’t abandon my French “heritage”: I read in English what I couldn’t get in French. I plunged into existentialism (I had started at Henri IV with L’existentialisme est un humanisme and L’étranger, maybe even with some more) and read any translation of the new masters I got my hands on. In short, Nirah, maybe even Natanyah, received its first existentialist settler; all that may have disappeared when I left. I don’t recall ever reading historical books about Nazi Germany or the war; it simply didn’t occur to me.
When Memory Comes may have appeared to some readers as a memoir describing utter loss, followed by a retrieval of self and the construction of a normal life. I have to correct or at least to nuance this impression. People who, like me, lived their childhood under catastrophic circumstances, may have built a “normal” exterior. Yet, no matter how ornamented the façade may appear, some flaw invariably remains at the very core of their personality. A strange dynamic often ensues: you can’t get rid of the flaw, but to offset it, you tirelessly improve the exterior — which does not help much and, for many years, will keep you desperately toiling, never secure, always anxious. This recurrent feeling gets ultimately numbed but it did accompany me as some kind of basso continuo through the ups and downs of a good part of my checkered existence. And, as unique as each individual story may be, it can, when told, produce some sense of recognition.
In my case, the inner flaw manifested itself mainly in emotional paralysis. At some stage in the seminary, I stopped longing for my parents and started worrying about how I would express happiness upon their return. I cried profusely when told they would not come back, but wasn’t that expected of me? Soon thereafter, mainly after I left the seminary, I recognized that nothing could touch me profoundly. Later I often used a metaphor to describe my incapacity to establish a normal emotional relationship: I was like an insect whose antennas had been torn off. It was not easy to recognize this from the outside — I smiled a lot, knew the right things to say, and readily adapted to fast-changing circumstances. People who knew me well were not fooled, however. “You are incapable of emotion,” I was not infrequently told. “Your soul is arid.”
The emotional paralysis applied to my relationships with people only. I could become enthusiastic about a cause (Zionism, for example) or very emotional when watching a film, reading a book, or listening to music. In short, there was hope for change — over time.
* * *
* Paul was my original name; I became Saul on arriving in Israel.
CHAPTER TWO
Paris
In June 1948, I’d left the Paris Gare de Lyon for Marseilles (Port-de-Bouc) and sailed to Israel on the Altalena. Five years later, I sailed from Israel to Marseilles on the Theodor Herzl, took the train to the Gare de Lyon, and was back in Paris. (My uncle Paul refused to pay for my ticket. I had no choice but to sell those of my father’s books and lithographs that I found in Nirah. I left my uncle without regret.)
After emerging from Métro station Saint-Paul on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), 1953, I schlepped my only suitcase to my former guardian’s address, rue de Birague, next to the Place des Vosges. I had been accepted as a second-year student at Sciences Po, as I had completed three years of evening classes at the Tel Aviv School of Law and Economics during my service in the army.
The difficult part was finding a job that would allow me to attend Sciences Po at least once a week, for the mandatory seminar. Working for my former guardian as a textile rep (I tried it for three weeks) wouldn’t do. I had a letter of recommendation to the Israeli embassy, and made an appointment with the second in command, Counselor Ziama (Zalman) Divon, to whom the letter was addressed. He looked at the letter and at some other documents. Then, eerily echoing my Nirah visitor of 1949, he remarked, “You came on the Altalena …” I got the job nonetheless, thanks to my “native” French.
Recently a German colleague who had read a few pages of the memoir asked me what was so terrible about arriving in Israel on the Altalena. It may be hard to convey the atmosphere of political fanaticism and suspicion that swept the fledgling state of Israel during its War of Independence; its survival was far from certain. While the socialist leadership, with Ben-Gurion at its head, was keeping the ship (no, the raft) of state from sinking during the first phase of the war against the Arab coalition, any internal political opponents were considered direct threats. In particular, Begin’s right-wing Irgun, which had allowed the Altalena to sail with almost one thousand “fighters” and tons of weapons, was regarded as a terrorist group possibly intent on organizing a military coup. Neither Begin nor anybody around him planned anything of the kind, but Ben-Gurion thought otherwise and for a long time, as we saw, arrival on the Altalena carried an unmistakable stigma.
1
Nothing of the majestic presence of Paris had changed, but the atmosphere, the feel of the city, was entirely different from when I had left. In 1948 I had escaped from a place in which, for many of its inhabitants (myself included), food and other essentials were still scarce. During the winter of 1947–48 the dormitories of Lycée Henri IV were freezing cold and the meals provided were woefully insufficient. Most boarders received food packages from home and were warmly clad. There wasn’t much sharing, however, as the needs of all were hardly fulfilled by what came from the outside.
Moreover, daily life was disrupted by major political demonstrations and strikes, orchestrated by the Communist-dominated trade unions organization, the CGT (Conféderation Générale du Travail); the mass rallies, also led by the Communist Party, protested against the Marshall Plan and the like. For a short while I took part in some of these demonstrations. At least once the strikes included the staff of schools and lycées and sent us boarders scurrying to students’ restaurants, where the fare was even worse. In short, the Paris of 1947–48 was hardly a city of unmitigated pleasure for me. Leaving for Israel was both the fulfillment of a dream and a deliverance from daily Parisian reality.
When I returned to Paris in the fall of 1953, everything seemed different. Yes, political life remained unsettled, mainly as a result of hopeless French attempts to keep control of Indochina (later Vietnam) and of the growing threat of a full-scale war to subdue the incipient national rebellion in Algeria. Governments followed each other with increasing speed under the nominal authority of President Vincent Auriol, followed by President René Coty. The Fourth Republic was dying.
I watched the events like everybody else, particularly when Pierre Mendès-France became prime minister (président du Conseil). He extricated the country from the war in Indochina and started doing the same in North Africa. The anti-Semitic attacks against Mendès grew, particularly am
ong the populist movement of Pierre Poujade. Some opposition also came from more traditional political old-timers, one of them being another Jewish politician, René Mayer, much more “French,” in his own eyes, than Mendès; it led to novelist François Mauriac’s stinging article in L’Express. Mauriac compared “Le grand Israelite français, René Mayer” and “le petit juif, Mendès-France” (the great French Israelite René Mayer and the little Jew Mendès-France), invoking the contemptuous attitude of the old French Jewish families of Alsatian background to the more plebeian Sephardic “little Jews”). I supported Mendès, not that it helped …
However, all of this political turmoil had no major impact on the course of daily life. Even in the eyes of an impecunious student, paid a meager salary by the Israeli embassy for work in the press department at first, then in the military attaché’s office, Paris in the mid-fifties was a feast; I felt like a ravenous guest standing at the threshold of the banquet hall.
For a year or so, I shared an apartment on rue Ampère (close to the embassy, located on avenue de Wagram), with my friend and colleague Meir Rosenne, who worked in the visa office of the consular section. I had received Meir’s address from his brother, who had been a fellow passenger on the Theodor Herzl. I called and when Meir told me that he also had a job at the embassy, I suggested that we rent an apartment together, close to our workplace. So we did. On many a morning when we arrived at avenue de Wagram, on foot of course, and the ambassador’s limo was idling in front of the building with driver in livery at the ready, Meir prophesied that one day he would ride in that kind of car with that kind of driver in uniform. And he was right. Another of our colleagues, who participated in many of our escapades, Eliahu Ben Elissar, also became an ambassador in Paris.
I had practically no contact with the ambassador, Yakov Tsur, and not much with his second in command, either. Most of my work kept me in the basement of the building, the domain of the press department, where I started working sometime in the late fall of 1953. It was headed by a most congenial attaché of Italian background, Dan Avni (or, in the original, Vittorio Segre). I couldn’t have wished for a nicer boss, and I soon was a frequent guest at the Avnis’ (Dan, Rosetta, and the first of their boys, Emanuel).
My work involved summarizing the daily press articles about Israel and meeting with journalists — Israeli correspondents needing assistance, journalists of the local Jewish press, and, of course, French journalists of all hues. Elie Wiesel, who at that time worked for the Israeli evening paper Yediot Ahronot, often came by. And sometime in 1954 or early 1955, I met a journalist from Haaretz, Shabtai Teveth, who became a very close friend.
And there was Sciences Po. It was a Grande École (French higher education was divided between its universities and its Grandes Écoles, which were much more selective institutions). The name “Sciences Po” was a remnant of the former elitist “École Libre des Sciences Politiques,” which, after the war, became “Institut d’Études Politiques,” a democratized school preparing for various branches of the civil service and more. If you were French, once you completed the three years of Sciences Po, you could compete again for admission to the École Nationale d’Administration, which led to the higher civil service. Foreigners like me, and like quite a few Israelis at that time, were limited to the first three years. Most of us chose the Relations Internationales department, which could lead to our own foreign service.
Once a week, we attended a mandatory seminar, but beyond that, attendance was never checked. Most of the time, work prevented me from getting to the lectures. Moreover, you could buy the mimeographed texts of these lectures in a bookstore opposite the entrance to the school, on the hallowed rue Saint-Guillaume. At the end of the year or of your stay at Sciences Po, you could sell back your mimeographed texts; thus the same copies were passed on to the next cohort, often with additional comments scribbled in the margins. As the lectures remained largely unchanged year after year, your predecessors even noted the exact spot of a lecturer’s standard joke.
I vividly remember some of the professors I occasionally listened to in halls packed with several hundred students. There was Pierre Renouvin, a revered professor of international relations history, who dealt particularly with the 1870–1914 period. When he entered the hall in his dark blue suit with one empty sleeve — he had lost an arm during the Great War — everyone stood up. There was an apparently excellent professor of economic history who “lost” me once he started explaining Ricardo’s theory of surplus value. Some teachers were downright amusing: François LeRoy, for example, who, from year to year, opened his lecture on French postwar foreign policy with the same outline: “French foreign policy after the Second World War was fuzzy in its aims, feeble in its means, and null in its results. Part one: ‘Fuzzy in Its Aims’…”
2
Apart from the embassy and Sciences Po, Paris offered its streets, theaters, cafés, and restaurants, its music and its dance halls. This last item demands a short preface. A further consequence of my strict wartime Catholic education was shyness around girls. This eased somewhat in Israel. In the army I had a few girlfriends; they allowed much, but not everything (and I probably did not insist strongly enough). The moment, however, I boarded the Theodor Herzl for Marseilles, I decided to change all that — and fast.
At the time, Paris harbored any number of expensive nightclubs and dozens of affordable dance halls with live orchestras; you didn’t go there with a girl but in order to find a girl or vice versa. (These dance halls were packed with young men and women with similar intentions.)
During my army service I had taken dance lessons in a studio on Ben Yehuda Street, in Tel Aviv, so that, technically, I could manage. The trick was not in the dancing, however, but rather in overcoming your inhibitions. You had to spot a girl you fancied in the crowd and then, while a dance was ending, rush to her and ask: “M’accorderez-vous la prochaine danse?” (Would you grant me the next dance?) If the answer was yes and the girl pleasant, you didn’t wait too long to ask her for the following dance. During all that time you had to talk your head off; in French you call it baratiner. Baratin (the noun, translated as “blah-blah” in the dictionary) demanded a special talent and I wasn’t bad at it. Then, if the response to your new request was positive (and you were already slow-dancing, glued to one other), you could start planning further ahead. Some dance halls were popular (Mimi Pinson on the Champs-Élysées, for example), others more subdued and select, like the Whisky à Gogo on rue Jean Mermoz (where in fact records had replaced the live band). The caveaux where you went to listen to jazz more than to dance represented a special category: thus, at the Vieux Colombier, for example, you could spend the evening with Claude Luter’s orchestra and Sidney Bechet playing the saxophone.
I became something of an authority on these institutions. I used to declare that if I ever chose to write a dissertation it would be on Parisian dance halls. Today, it would be a great topic in cultural history but I am afraid that this kind of dance hall has disappeared. Some of my “conquests” were just casual encounters, others turned into relationships that may have lasted for several weeks; one became a two-year-long affair that ended with my departure from Paris. Incidentally, Meir and I shared a large apartment where each of us had his own room and reasonable privacy. In short, I was “sowing my wild oats,” albeit very late in the day by present standards.
There was a special treat that didn’t cost much: students could buy tickets for a very low price to a famous nightclub off the Champs-Élysées: the Villa d’Este. You had to be well-dressed, tie and all, come relatively early, and sit leisurely with a bottle of pseudo-champagne, so that the place seemed already partly full when, somewhat later, tourists started looking in. There, at the Villa d’Este, you could hear the best of the best: Georges Brassens, Gilbert Bécaud, and the comedian Fernand Raynaud, among many others.
Finally, there was the world of theater and film. In that domain, the fifties were an extraordinary time. In theater, Jean Vilar’s T
NP (Théâtre National Populaire) was revolutionary in many ways since its founding in the late forties, the opposite of the august but stuffy Comédie Française. One of the TNP’s stars, Gérard Philipe, had also become an admirable film actor: I shall never forget Le diable au corps, which I probably saw in 1947 or 1948. In the 1950s, I went to all of Gérard Philipe’s movies from Belles de nuit on. This was not yet the French “new wave,” but these more traditional films and their more traditional directors (Carné, Clément, Renoir, Clair, Autan-Lara, among some other great names), most of whom were already famous well before the war, created a world of unique sensitivity and beauty.
I shouldn’t forget to mention one of the magic moments of daily life: the meals. For me, at the time, food was not only about nourishment; a meal turned into a ritual, the occasion of a daily celebration. I had been hungry during the war, then during the postwar years in France, and a year after I arrived in Israel, Tsena, the austerity period and the rationing, began. The main staple, tuna fish, delivered in endless shipments from Denmark, became the unavoidable daily fare for months on end.
In Paris, I usually had lunch in the same restaurant, close to the embassy. It turned into a fixed repeat ceremony: oeuf dur mayonnaise, steak frites (saignant), chèvre, meringue Chantilly,* espresso, and red wine, mostly Côtes du Rhône. How could I work after that? I did, without any problem — like most Frenchmen. This was nothing compared to the dinners (oysters, steak au poivre,† etc.). I hadn’t heard of weight issues, nor, incidentally, of the dangers of smoking. I enjoyed indiscriminately one or the other brand of cigarettes: Gitanes or Gauloises bleues, without filters. Smoking a pack a day was common.
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