It looked like paradise on earth. The beach, the lake, the hut… We went into the water for a midnight bath and then went into the beach hut to get to sleep. When I was lying on the bet with the oil lamp lighting the straw ceiling, I caught sight of hundreds of small whitish spiders above our heads and told my husband there was no way I would sleep in that bed, with those spiders hanging above my head.
My husband always had a solution ready. He grabbed one of our beach towels, and with a big gathering gesture, got rid of the threatening spiders, telling me what a sissy I was!

Well, it didn’t matter. Now I could sleep.
The next morning, I got up and picked that beach towel to fold it, and guess what, no spiders there dead or alive, but huge holes in the towel!

Aren’t you glad I behaved like a sissy? I asked my husband. For all we know those little spiders may have been poisonous and in any case, they were quite able to sting their way out of the towel.

I think I have already posted this story in French at my other blog but am grateful to Virginia DeBoldt at First 50 Words for the nudge. I have not been much of a post writer lately.
That sunset photo was taken in Normandy. I just don’t have any photo of a real spider in my photostream and some of the spider photos I came across on flickr were just too scary

Last minute precision: the towel was not in the hut. I made sure he hung it somewhere outside!

The holiday season to me is a hurdle that I have to jump every year. Sixteen years ago at the beginning of December, my father-in-law passed away and less than a month later, after a rather weird Christmas holiday, on a bleak January morning, my husband drove away to a car accident that cost him his life and that was the end of the world as we knew it, my 6 1/2 years old daughter and myself.
I have, of course, survived! What else is there to do? And I have had great moments. Most of the time, I consider myself lucky to live the sort of life I am living.
There are so many things that I enjoy doing, such good friends and family around me. But once in a while, I’ll start thinking of my cup as being half empty instead of half full.

When I took this photo, some time ago, it was snowing outside and I was sitting inside a car. I pointed my camera towards that bike out there, and the person who was driving suggested I rolled down the window, but the drops on the car window just suited my mood of the day.

I never thought of all this while I was taking the shot and later on, wondered why I liked that snapshot.

The bike outside was blurred, just like my life in that passing moment and all I could focus on were the drops on the car window.

No more so… until next year?

or how Gitta‘s attitude to death is still influencing me.

To listen to this post in French, click below

I don’t write much in the blog these days, too lazy, but Ronni’s post, And When I Die…where she also announces the death of Olive Riley, the Australian blogger who died at age 108, got me to remember.

Gitta was scared, I think, of anything relating to death, to the point that she considered it bad luck to even talk about it.
If you spoke badly of a dead person, which I enjoyed doing, just to rile her a bit, she’d do her spitting three times act, to ward off bad things.

Pooh, pooh, pooh! she would go! You don’t speak evil of the dead!

If I sat on the floor, which in my youth I loved to do –wish I were nimble enough to do it–, that was bad too and she’d grumble until I got up. It took me years before I understood that to her, sitting on the floor was wrong because of the expected behaviour of religious Jews, who will not shave or sit on a chair for a certain amount of time after a death in the family.

She firmly believed that cemeteries were not places for children and I had to fight her to go to my beloved grandmother Lea‘s funeral, even though I was far from being a child when she died, since I had reached the ripe age of 16!
As for writing a will, the only reason that made her accept it was that she felt that thanks to that will, she could still control her children after her death.

I have told my daughter jokingly that when I die, she’d better make sure to keep my blogs online or else, my angry ghost would come and tickle her toes at night. I have even told her the general idea about my funeral –very general, mind you, as I don’t intend to organise anything myself. I hate organising parties, much less funeral parties!

And in a very remote corner of my limbic brain, I can hear Gitta whispering that it would indeed be bad luck to write a last post, while I am still alive.

Mais Maman, I won’t be able to do it once I’m dead!

and I can hear her say:

–Pooh, pooh, pooh! You don’t TALK about these things!

To listen to this post in French, click below

Whenever I see a child on his/her dad’s shoulders, I remember the feelings of power and elation that I felt whenever my father carried me so. My father was quite tall for a man of his generation, and when I straddled his shoulders, I felt like the master of the universe!
This photo was taken when I was ten, well past the age of straddling anyone’s shoulders and although I don’t remember the details of the episode, let it suffice to say that the year following this photo, in 1955, my father suffered from a massive backache problem and was bedridden for months on end. He had a lumbar disc hernia which caused excruciating sciatic pain, and for months, they couldn’t decide whether he should undergo surgery or not.
So six years after I had been forced to lie in my parents’ bed for something that felt like ever, it was his turn. I remember this well, how my mother bought our first TV, a black and white set, of course. In those days, there were only a couple of hours of programmes every evening, and they showed the same ballet over and over, for TV sellers to be able to show their customers something, during the day.
My father couldn’t move at all, he was imprisoned in some sort of plaster corset and my mother had resumed her nursing duties. She was never feeling better that when she could look after one of us.

To listen to this post in French, click below

It was Kenju’s post that set me wondering and remembering.
She wrote:

Do you remember when children used to ride in the window ledge above the back seat of cars? As a very young child, I used to love riding up there, warmed by the sun on the window. Being in motion always made me a little carsick, so climbing into the warm window ledge put me to sleep, and I could tolerate the ride without getting sick.

Well, let me tell you, I don’t remember anything of the kind. Have a look at the car below, and at its size: can you imagine a child lying there? I don’t think this is something I have ever seen in this country. I’ve seen small dogs or cats on the window ledge but never a child.

Ever since I was a little girl, I have always hated riding in cars. I don’t remember my parents not having a car. The car was a luxury for many people when I was little, but to my father, it was indispensable for his work. First when they were working on open-air markets, and later on when my father travelled twice a week from Amiens and Rouen to collect items that they would sell in their Paris shop.
Sometimes, the whole family packed into the car, and we would go to Deauville where my parents had a small house with a garden. In those days, there was no motorway from Paris to Normandy and the 200 km trip took quite a long time, as we had to drive through small towns, which considerably slowed us down. On busy days, the trip could take up to three or four hours. Anyway, in those days, in my child’s perception of time, one hour in the car was sheer torture. One couldn’t really move around, and I was always being sick. When I said that I didn’t feel well, my father always said that I had to wait a little while longer, he couldn’t stop straight away, he had to find a suitable spot, but the truth, I felt, was that he just didn’t want to stop. And more than once did I end up throwing up on the edge of the road, or worse, in the car. But when it came to driving, my father just didn’t want to listen to anyone. He was the only one in the family who could drive, and that made him the sole master aboard.
My cousin R. , six years younger than me was even worse, when she warned that she was not feeling well, if Dad didn’t stop in the next few minutes, there we were, bathing in foul smells!
The car was the only place in the world where I could actually get bored! I always had a book at hand wherever I went, but I just couldn’t read in the car, it made me car-sick.
In those days, we didn’t have a radio, much less a cassette player and cd players didn’t exist. So when my mother was in the mood, we’d play games like telling stories about the shape of clouds, or guessing games in which she’d say the first and last letter of a name, and I’d have to guess which capital city it was, or we’d review the capital cities of every country I knew the name of. Or we’d sing songs.
Later on, they fed me Dramamine before each trip, and that made it even worse because it made me sleep hours on end, a sleep full of nightmares probably induced by the drug.
Those looooong, endless car rides felt like the world would be in motion and uncomfortable forever, a world in which I had no say at all.

About the photo, my father loved Peugeots, so the car in the photo was a Peugeot, and on the side, at the level of my father’s shoulder, there was an arrow that would actually stick out, indicating that you were about to make a turn, instead of today’s turning lights. One little detail I had forgotten, but I can still hear the click sound it made

Recently, one of the French magazines, Le Nouvel Observateur, supposedly more intellectual than others (!) had a special issue devoted to Simone de Beauvoir and the cover, which I do not want to show here, was a picture of her, naked, seen from the back. This is what culture has become in this country, one of the women writers, a philosopher and a novelist, the first woman to have achieved the then very prestigious Agrégation, a woman who’s been a role model for my generation, reduced to a naked backside photograph. But then what can you expect when the political press tend to deal only with Sarkozy’s love affairs?

I’m just venting my anger here, but what I originally had in mind was Peggy’s meme, at Day to Day Life of a Very Lazy Gardener

The idea is to list five things in your life now that you would have never thought would be in your life when you were 25.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I am not really fond of memes, but I saw this at Kenju’s yesterday and found it interesting, so I’ll comply.

For one, when I was young, as I said before, Simone de Beauvoir was my role model. And I just wanted to be like her. A free woman who would live a free life, the way she chose, no strings attached, no bourgeois attachments, no marriage, no children, a succession of intellectual and fascinating men in my life. So if you had told me there and then that I would get married and have a child, I wouldn’t have believed you!
But I did! I met Roland, at the ripe age of 30 and we eventually got married.

Another thing is, I tried my hand at a variety of things, all having to do with languages. The dream of my life was then to become an interpreter and work in some international organization like the UN or the UNESCO, no less and do simultaneous translating.
I attended classes in a school for interpreters and translaters and turned out to be much to slow to fit the bill.
But there was one thing that I definitely knew! I could and would NEVER be a teacher. I must say that the teachers of my school days were far from being role models. Anyway, once, I was asked to substitute in a professional school as a teacher for one of my friends. What convinced me was that I didn’t have a job at the time, and that I needed the money.
So there I went, taught a couple of classes, certainly didn’t know what I was doing, but the students didn’t complain, and … I decided that this was what I wanted to do.

Till a very ripe age, I never felt that I wanted to have children. When they stuck a baby in my arms, I felt silly and awkward, infants and little children certainly didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t find them cute and I certainly didn’t experience anything like maternal instinct. Actually, that worried me a lot when I got pregnant, because I thought I would certainly be a totally incompetent mother and would never have the patience for a baby or a toddler.
Well, I surprised myself. I didn’t feel my baby’s diapers smelt as bad as other babies’ and got very interested in my daughter, although she always complained that I was not paying enough attention.

As I didn’t want to have children, it was very difficult for me to understand some of my friends who got pregnant as they were single, and decided to have the child. The raising and education of a child, with no father in sight, seemed to me some crazy goal and I thought that bringing a child to the insane world in which we lived was bad enough, let alone bringing up the said child on their own.
Little did I know what life had in store for me. On a bleak Tuesday of January, my Roland drove away to his death, leaving Julie, aged six and a half, and me, her mother, to fend for ourselves. This was exactly sixteen years ago today. A date that is like a hurdle I have to jump every year with ever renewed longing and sadness.
So raise a child by myself I did. And a proud mother I am today. Not proud of myself, because I did what I could, but proud that my daughter is such a wonderful and accomplished young woman that her father, somewhere, is certainly proud of, too.

As a little girl, and later as a young woman, I was a very keen reader. A speedy one, too, so I read literally scores of books every year. I borrowed them at the local library. Reading was just part of me. And then, somehow, I can’t even remember how or when, I lost the urge. I wasn’t interested in reading any longer. Or rather, I took to reading murder mysteries and nothing else. I couldn’t focus on anything else. And this has been going on for quite a long time, years in fact. This is really one thing I couldn’t have imagined happening to me.
And yet, in the last year, I seem to have resumed reading a little. Maybe your influence, blogger friends

I won’t tag anyone, really, but I’d love to know what Ronni, Millie, Autolycus, Septuagent, who hasn’t blogged in a long time , Naomi or MotherPie would have to say.
Claudia of Toronto, if you feel like it, I’ll be delighted to have you as a guest blogger –you do the writing and I publish it

To listen to this post in French, click below

At the back of the photo is written 1956, but I think I must have been at least 13, so I think the real date must be 1957, or maybe 1958.
This photo was taken at the Bar Mitzvah of a childhood friend. I remember being quite envious, because I too would have liked to be showered with presents, but a few sessions at the local synagogue convinced me that religion was definitely not my cup of tea. My Catholic friends who went to confession on Saturdays and racked their brains for sins to confess were not better off, but at least they didn’t have to sit in a separate section of the temple as if they were contagious
I remember quite well the dress I was wearing. Red velvet with a bow my mother had chosen, and which I hated, sitting right in the middle of my bottom, not making it look any thinner. I also remember those red shoes I was wearing. They were my first pair of shoes that looked normal, since in those days, I was still wearing prescription shoes that both felt and looked awful.
On the photo, I am crouching between my uncle Henry and my aunt Fanny who both played central parts in my childhood. They took me to museums, theatres, to the circus, and I spent more than a summer with them and their daughter, R., near Dax. My parents were very busy in those days and as their busiest working season was in September, they were never free to take a holiday in the summer with their children.
Fanny married Henry when I was four years old and both of them were wonderful to their nephews and nieces in general and to me most particularly.
Henry who was very fond of children and light music, was always ready to take me to the circus or to see an operetta. And Fanny loved museums and gardens and we often went to Musée Carnavalet, where I haven’t been for years.
Needless to say that I considered them as my private property and became quite jealous when R., their daughter was born. I was six, then, and asked to be given a baby bottle like the newly-born baby. My aunt, who had never studied psychology, did make me a bottle, and that settled it. I remember distinctly thinking that it was a lot of work for yucky results.
When she told my mother she had given me a bottle, Gitta was furious. She thought Fanny was spoiling me rotten. She was indeed, but not that particular time.

I am reposting here Where I am from, posted for the first time in February 2005, at a time when I was only starting taking photos and when I was still recovering from the psychological effects of breast cancer and radiation therapy. Why this morning? I don’t know. I just felt like doing it.

To listen to this post in French click below

I have followed Fragments from Floyd‘s assignment and written about where I am from. It took me a long time, as English is not my native language and I have mixed feelings about posting this so I hope you’ll bear with me. But here goes my attempt at WIF, as Fred1st put it.

I am from printing ink, film and newspaper, from the smell of soap and suds during the week and roast chicken and cheese-cake on Sundays, from working on open-air markets to owning a shop.

I am from the small, pink-curtained, scary-at-nights bedroom and from the long corridor with the old-fashioned refrigerator at the end, with the frightening articulated doll waiting in ambush, from the library where I borrowed as many books as was possible, and from the oblivion that came from these books.

I am from the hortensia and roses grown with horse manure, the incongruous sheep passing by our house, the long afternoons with a book on the beach, the playing cards with my illiterate grandmother

I am from the reading and studying and being stubborn, from the suffering in silence and rejoicing together around the piano, from Léa my grandmother and Fanny my aunt, and Gitta, my mother and Joseph my father. I am also from these relatives I never knew, my grandmother Feigl, and those who died in the Holocaust, my grandfather, Jozef, my aunt Rosa and my uncles David and Solomon, and also from this other grandfather who left his wife and children fend for themselves

I am from the survivors and hard-working, self-taught polyglotts who found shelter in France and settled in, from these people who wanted culture and education for their children

From ‘finish your plate, so many Chinese children are starving’ and ‘you are so cute when you’re asleep’ and ‘little girls must obey their parents’, from roaming the Louvre in winter and boating on the Bois de Boulogne lake in summer with my father, and from knitting endless sweaters with my mother

I am from being a Jew when Jews are attacked, but otherwise a practising atheist, from wondering why women aren’t allowed to sit where men can.

I’m from France, Poland, Bulgaria, my mother’s kneidlars and my grandmother’s burriquitas from my mother-in-law’s delicious tourte à l’herbe, and from travelling round the world with Roland, my husband.

From the woman who left her family and country to marry a man, changed her mind and married another one, from the woman who stayed with her mother until her relatives practically forced her to get married, from the woman whose husband wanted to marry her younger sister but married her instead, from the man who had to leave school at twelve to become an accountant, and help his mother raise his brother and sister decently;

I am from that large box which once held our dirty linen and now holds all the family memories, from things past that I am trying to reconstruct, from the family puzzle and from my inner puzzle.

I’d love to see more people trying this. You can find a list of more Where I am from here
The original template is here

To listen to this post in French, click below

Sixty-three years ago, on September 24th, my father rode his bicycle from Thoiry to Issoudun to meet his newborn daughter. The war was not over yet, but the German armies were starting to leave and there had been heavy bombing in the area. Joseph always said that there were corpses and burnt cars on each side of the road.
From what Gitta said, getting me into the world was a breeze. She claimed that when I got out, her belly went down with a plop and that she started giggling, which made the matron worry! I always thought that she had made that part of the story up! I was the only girl born in the maternity ward and I had brown curly hair that the matron combed, and apparently, she paraded me around, showing of my curly hair.
When they took me back to Thoiry, the hamlet where they hid during the last part of the war, a kilometre away from Saint-Georges sur Arnon, and some 10 kms from Issoudun, Solange, who lived on the farm opposite, had torn sheets into nappies that they gave my mother for the newly-born baby.
I wish I had written down all the stories that my uncle Victor, my aunt Fanny and my parents have told me. I was quite upset, when I started writing this because I looked for Solange’s last name in my memory, and it wasn’t there any longer. I phoned my brother, who was ten at the time. He remembered Solange very well, and also her two sisters, Louisette and Paulette, but couldn’t remember their last name either. How unfortunate, when you think that these wonderful people knew all along that we were Jewish, and never said a word.

When the war was over, and my parents were ready to go back to Deauville where they lived before the war, my mother went to thank those kind people for everything they’d done to help them and said:

You know, Solange, I have to tell you. We are Jewish. We couldn’t tell during the war, but now I want to tell you.

And Solange said that they had known all along.
Without Solange and all the wonderful people like her, I wouldn’t have been around to celebrate my 63rd birthday, yesterday, with my daughter.

Edited September 27th, my brother finally managed to remember the last name of Solange’s family. The Perrot family from Thoiry who welcomed and helped our family through hard times certainly deserved to have their name remembered. Thank you.

To listen to this post in French, click below

The Jewish New Year has come and gone and I am so far from Jewish traditions these days that I would have totally missed it if it were not for reading blogs and watching TV news.
Jennifer’s post on This time of Year set me remembering.

I do have such good childhood memories of those festivities
As I said earlier, my parents were both Jewish, my mother was a Jew from Poland/Belarus, an Ashkenazi, and my father was from Bulgaria, therefore a Sefardic Jew.
Neither of them was really interested in religion. My mother said that she used to eat kosher food at home when she was a girl, but when you consider that the food was cooked by a non-Jewish servant, her beloved Fiokla, I don’t know how kosher that would be considered by traditionalist Jews
On my father’s side, cooking Jewish Bulgarian food was usual, but neither my Aunt Fanny, my father’s sister, nor my Uncle Victor, his brother, ever kept kosher or was even mildly interested.
However, twice a year, the family gathered, once for Rosh Hashanah, and once for Pessah, and in those occasions, my mother cooked her home specialties.

I still have the fragrance of chicken soup and kneidlachs that Gitta, my mother, cooked on those two occasions, just because everyone loved it. Without kneidlachs, a festive meal would just not have been as festive. There would also be borscht, made with beetroot, the only way I can stomach beetroot.
Then would come the gefilte fisch, and finally the cheesecake that Gitta made so well.
Unfortunately, I haven’t kept any of these recipes, although I did help along, Gitta never really did the same twice in a row, and I guess in those days, I felt like she would always be around!
I don’t want to forget appetizers like gehakte leber, which along the years was in the company of more sefardic things like burriquitas, or home-made tarama.

My father would preside at the table and read some prayer written in Latin letters as he couldn’t read Hebrew letters then the dinner would start.
Sometimes, I’m sorry I didn’t carry on any of these traditions, but with a totally secular marriage, and being an absolute non-believer and a lazy cook, it couldn’t have happened.

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