A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [190]
Finkelsztajn's favorite thing was when new customers hovered uncertainly over the platters. He explained that they could buy by the gram or in a sandwich. But before they decided, he would tell them that they must try everything. Taking little pieces of bread, he would carefully spread samples on each, handing them one by one to the customer who tasted and moaned with approval while Finkelsztajn smiled his warm, easy smile, a happy man in his trade. He had never wanted to bake bread, but feeding people and listening to them purr was a trade for Henri.
Although everything American had become fashionable in the Marais, Americans were starting to annoy him. When they spoke Yiddish they always used the familiar form. Always “Vos makhst du” for “How are you” and never “Vos makht ir?” And in any language Henri was tired of the line, “Just looking”—because they really were just looking. American Jews who had heard there was something Jewish on Rue des Rosiers went to have a look. They examined the small shop and stared up at the mid-nineteenth-century curlicues on the ceiling, and they walked out without buying anything, but what was worse to Henri, without saying anything. If he said something to them, they replied, “Just looking.” Then they walked out, crossed the street, and standing in Front of Journo's, they would snap a photograph of Henri's ocher-colored storefront with the scrapes and chips from trucks that tried to go up on the sidewalk to pass parked cars on the narrow street and didn't quite make it. “The Americans come here as though this is a museum and we are not real people,” Henri complained.
He drifted out of the shop, into the narrow street, and found people to chat with or things to watch. If nothing else, he could watch the oversized trucks scraping away his paint. Andre Journo was often running nervously between his restaurant and his art gallery, a cigar clenched in his mouth. The spry, tightly wound Mediterranean would fly past the dreamy, heavyset Central European. Their paths crossed a few dozen times every day. But they seldom had as much as a nod for each other. It was not about the difference between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. It was about real estate.
In French law, owning a commercial space and owning the walls to that space are two separate transactions. Icchok Finkelsztajn, with the money loaned to him by friends in the Pletzl, had only been able to buy the space for his bakery. Henri had later tried to buy the walls, but by then the owner would not sell because he wanted to sell the entire building. The building was run-down, and the tenants were paying 80 francs for an apartment. When the Journo family lived there, they had paid 60 francs. The owner earned barely enough to maintain the building. In 1980 he happily unloaded the building to someone interested in the real estate market. The new owner slowly drove his tenants out and restored the building, selling off the apartments at more than $2,000 a square foot.
At this point Journo had seen an opportunity to get control of the building and asked Finkelsztajn to go into business with him. Henri, by instinct, could not imagine having nervous, fast-talking Andre Journo as a business partner and declined. Managing on his own, Journo got the art gallery on the ground floor and the Arab cafe next to it when the owner retired and went back to North Africa. Then, in the spring of 1992, to Henri Finkelsztajn's astonishment, he discovered that Journo now owned the walls to his bakery and wanted him out.
The wall owner can evict the space owner at any time by buying out his space. If Journo did this to Henri, he could renovate the space and sell a luxury apartment “in the heart of the Marais.” Because the ground-floor storefront was not well-suited for an apartment, Finkelsztajn was able to talk Journo into taking over only the upper space where Henri had grown up. It was now kitchen space, and losing it meant that he would have to go back to baking in the basement. Almost a half-century