Category Archives: Diving into the past

When I was young…

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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.

1For 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.

2Another 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.

3Till 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.

4As 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.

5As 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 ;)

Happy days

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To listen to this post in French, click below

With my uncle and aunt in 1958
With my uncle and aunt in 1958

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.

Reposting: Where I am from

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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

Sixty-three years ago

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To listen to this post in French, click below

Julie and meSixty-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.

New Year

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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.

Gitta serving the mealI 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.

1978, Joseph reading a prayer
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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