A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [20]
But after three months, the foundry management told him he could not work there anymore because the French government had rejected his application for working papers. Reluctantly, he returned to Paris and learned to be a baker in Korcarz's shop, mixing huge vats of dough and kneading and braiding the challah for Friday night. What he most hated was having to be in a basement. Bakers stripped nearly naked to bear the heat, working with coal- or wood-burning ovens in closed basements. After a few hours’ work, the entire room would feel like an oven—with no light, no scenery, no jovial French comrades.
The bakery was located in the Pletzl, a Yiddish word meaning “settlement” that was also the local name for most of Paris's fourth arrondissement, in the center of the city. The buildings there looked even worse than the sooty nineteenth-century facades that had so depressed Icchok at the Gare du Nord. They were smaller and several centuries old, cracked, sometimes even tilting, and the apartments inside were small and getting smaller as they were subdivided to make room for more and more immigrants. The neighborhood had been dominated by Alsatian Jews, who had moved to Paris in the 1870s after the Germans took Alsace. The Alsatians of the Pletzl were working-class Jews in sturdy crude clothing, but they were noticeably better off than the new arrivals—strange, bearded, scruffy-looking Yiddish-speakers without education or even hygiene. Finkelsztajn was one of thousands of Polish Jews who had turned up in the Pletzl in the past ten years. Entire families had arrived, carrying their belongings, looking for a room. Many were leftists like Finkelsztajn. The ones who were religious would have nothing to do with the Grand Rabbi of Paris; they set up their own little one-room synagogues—what are called shtibls in Yiddish—where they could murmur their ancient five-tone Hebrew chants. In 1934 the president of the Consistoire, the official Jewish establishment, complained that the influx of all these immigrants would slow down the process of assimilation.
While there had been little possibility for Jews to assimilate in Poland, in France it was expected of Jews. When the French Revolution addressed “the Jewish question,” it was said that “there cannot be a nation within a nation.” Therefore, it was decreed, Jews were free Frenchmen and would henceforth have the same rights as all other Frenchmen. But in exchange, Jews had agreed to act like all other Frenchmen. In order to make Jews more like Catholics and therefore easier to understand and regulate, Napoleon had the Jews reorganize their community into a hierarchy like that of the Catholic Church, with a central authority, the Consistoire Israelite, and a central synagogue with a head rabbi known as the Grand Rabbi of France.
One hundred years after the French Revolution, there were 85,000 Jews in France. Of these, some 500 were thought to be traditional, but the rest were not very different from Catholics. Rabbis wore priestlike robes. Jewish children had little celebrations at the appropriate age that corresponded to baptism and first communion. The adults offered flowers to the dead instead of the traditional stones, and they played organ music in synagogues instead of the traditional five-tone Hebrew chants. There were even discussions about shifting the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.
THE KORCARZ bAKERY was on a corner in a narrow, dark, and particularly dirty street named Rue des Rosiers, “Rosebush Street,” not out of irony but because in the early thirteenth century it had led to a royal rose garden. The corner was sunny, though, and the Korcarzes decorated the building's facade with cheerful bits of blue-glazed tile in a bright modern mosaic. In 1933, back in Poland, Dwojra said good-bye to her parents, her sister Bella, and her baby brother Sacha in their little village outside Kielce, and moved to Paris to join