A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [189]
The Journos had expanded. In 1989, Andre's father, Roger, died, and his mother decided to retire and sold the little grocery. Andre bought a bigger store, then expanded it into a store and restaurant. Another brother started a cafe across the street from Goldenberg's, and another sister had a food store. They all lived on Rue des Rosiers and raised their children there. On Friday nights Andre closed his restaurant and shoved all the tables together into one long table set with roasted peppers, pickled vegetables, and chal-lalis. More than a dozen Journos with their teenage children sat around and said the blessing for the candles and the wine, the men putting their paper napkins on their heads for the blessing. That was their only religious concession before they settled into the family Friday-night couscous. Outside, Orthodox Jews were scurrying to their shtibls, and young couples were strolling, looking for the newest restaurant, wondering what sort of silly party they were passing with the men all putting paper napkins on their heads.
Andre also had an art gallery with paintings of behatted Orthodox life that did not seem to attract much interest from the Orthodox but drew some tourists, who expected this kind of thing in the Pletzl. The gallery was in Finkelsztajn's building, and the restaurant was directly across the street from Henri's store. Henri, who had never really wanted to be a baker, now had family and employees and was functioning largely as a host. He greeted people at his store, especially old-time customers. He gossiped. He would find a day-old challah and put it in a bag, silently drift out in the street, and hand it to a beggar without ceremony. He wandered.
He had bought back the old bakery with the blue tiles at the corner of Rue des Ecouffes, and it was now run by his son Sacha. They had the kind of working relationship that Henri had enjoyed with his own father. When Sacha was 12 he had gone to a summer camp, where he fell in love with a girl, Florence, from the twentieth arrondissement. She was from a Jewish family, and her mother's grandfather had owned a shop selling religious articles on Rue des Rosiers. But the grandfather had been deported and killed, and after the war the family had settled into a more affluent part of Paris. After summer camp ended, Florence and Sacha did not see each other again, because they lived too far away for twelve-year-olds to visit each other, and their parents wouldn't let them take the metro. That dewy, dry-throated, forever-and-ever twelve-year-old first love was left to fade.
Twelve years passed, and Florence happened to visit Rue des Rosiers and saw a bakery called Finkelsztajn's. She started asking questions. Sacha and Florence were married three years later, in 1985. In 1986 they had a daughter. While Sacha ran the store on Rue des Ecouffes, Florence ran Henri's store, In 1992 she had triplets, two girls and a boy. A long-range planner, when the children were still infants, Florence had already spoken to a rabbi about doing two bat mitzvahs and a bar mitzvah on the same Saturday.
Henri, with all this commerce and family, had taken on a contented look as he drifted between the cash register and the deli-counter in the bakery. Down the street, Sacha was in charge of non-bakery food—several kinds of herring and different dishes with cheese and spices, and liver, all with the old Yiddish names. As in Antwerp, the Poles who came to Paris after the fall of Communism headed straight for the Jewish neighborhood looking for work. Poles worked for Henri and Jo Goldenberg and any of the Ashke-nazim still in the Pletzl. Henri was amused by the irony of it, but on the other hand, after a lifetime of being told he was from