A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [143]
He had never lived much of a Jewish life, but in Valenciennes, a town near the Belgian border—where, for the first time, he was completely cut off from other Jews—a question came to him: “Am I a Jew or not?” It seemed to him, at 26, that he had to make a choice. He had behind him the whole history of the Blums, the Levys, and the Altmanns. He thought about his great-grandfather, who had believed he was an established businessman until the Dreyfus case forced him to flee; about his grandfather, who lived the good life in Paris until the Nazis came and he had to sell his business; about his uncle, who was deported despite his changed name; and about the way his parents had raised him and his two sisters to be affluent Parisians who only occasionally entertained the idea of Jewishness. You can't be a little bit Jewish, can you? Aren't you either Jewish or not Jewish? Isn't that what we had all discovered by accident?
Daniel became active in Jewish fundraising activities, and soon he was president of a group called New Leadership, an organization of people like him—young Jews from wealthy families working to raise money for Israel. Daniel organized visits to Israel, going back himself several times. More than fun and funny pottery, this work had become a way for him to feel Jewish, feel involved with Jewish life. But did giving money, raising funds, mean being involved in Judaism? He was still troubled, and one day at a Jewish wedding he began talking about this to a man he met. The man said, “Listen, if you want to search a bit, call me.”
Altmann began spending one night a week studying the Mish-nah, the first part of the Talmud. After a year his teacher said he needed a more advanced teacher and sent him to Rue Pavee, to the dank and moldy building next to the Rue Pavee synagogue where Chaim Rottenberg and his wife Rifka lived. On the top floor, in a large threadbare room with worn floorboards, Rav Rottenberg taught a small group of men on Thursday nights. They were the people he had somehow grabbed to join his fast-growing community.
In 1978, the year that Altmann met him, Rottenberg was still a man of boundless energy, a rigorous, uncompromising enforcer. Before Passover that year, he had gone to Strasbourg to inspect the matzoh makers, storming into the factory in his black coat, asking questions, looking around, making sure the matzoh was baked in no more than eighteen minutes because, it is thought, leavening could take place if it were baked any longer. The matzoh dough was being mixed in a huge vat, and Rottenberg had to climb up a ladder to peer in and make sure everything looked kosher and chametz free. Preoccupied by the inspection, he lost his balance and fell off the ladder.
To Rifka, this was the fatal fall, the fall from the matzoh vat, somehow God's will. In truth, the doctors examining him after the accident discovered he was suffering from Parkinson's disease. Thereafter he slowly weakened.
It took four years of study to turn Daniel Altmann, the wealthy assimilated Parisian, into a devout Orthodox Jew. He decided to marry and start a traditional family. Not exactly like Levy Kohane, who had never been in the company of a girl, thirty-year-old Altmann went to the synagogue, to the study group, the cheder, and asked for a suitable woman to marry. The community found him Lynda Abitan, a woman from a deeply religious Marrakesh family. Lynda's father had died when she was very young, and her mother had raised six children by herself, working in a factory, making sure they were all religious and well married. Lynda was the outspoken, independent, and still-unmarried one. Her mother was beginning to worry about her. She was religious, but she just