A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [27]
The Romanian, however, fought until he got back his bakery. But at the end of 1945 he decided to sell it to a Jew from the Pletzl. He liked Icchok, but the amount Icchok and Dwojra had saved was not even close to the price he wanted. The Romanian agreed to hold the bakery for Icchok and gave him a deadline for raising the rest of the money. Their fundraising became a Pletzl-wide project. Most of the merchants on Rue des Rosiers donated, and soon the Finkelsztajns had their own new bakery.
If Icchok had to be a baker and spend his life working alone and indoors, at least he would do it the right way in his own shop. He was not going to spend his days laboring in a dark basement. After moving the ovens to the back of the ground floor, he permanently sealed up the basement, proclaiming that working in a basement was slavery.
Their first customer was the diamond merchant who had taken them to the club on Rue Cadet.
IT WAS NOT ONLY small businesses that “Aryans” had taken. Rene Levy lost a huge enterprise. At the outbreak of the war, he had been the sixty-two-year-old retiring president of the textile association. He had foreseen that he would lose his extremely profitable factory, which produced men's handkerchiefs, those huge rectangles of fine material that were a stylish accessory in the 1930s. Smart “Aryan” businessmen knew that they didn't have to offer Jews good prices for their businesses, since the Jews were going to have to sell anyway. Levy, with little choice, sold to the association secretary, a man named Boussac.
The Levy family's fortunes had risen and fallen with a half-century of French history. In 1895 the Levys had been an established French textile family, part of the solid upper-middle class of eastern France. In January of that year, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was publicly degraded, his buttons removed, and his sword broken, as an angry crowd shouted “Death to Jews!” Dreyfus was of a background similar to the Levys’, and, like them, he made the mistake of thinking that he totally blended into French society. Now suddenly he was being convicted of passing information to the Germans, based on erroneous evidence and supported by the notion that “Jews are like that.” Anti-Semitism became so virulent at workplaces, in schools, and on streets, that the Levys were forced to leave France, where their family had lived since before the Revolution, and relocate their textile business to Belgium.
After a decade had passed, the anti-Semites became quiet again, except for a few radical-right newspapers. The Levys moved back to France. Their son Rene married a woman who, also like Dreyfus, was from an affluent Alsatian Jewish industrial family. Her family had built a textile factory in northern France. In 1912, Rene Levy and his wife settled into the grand bourgeois life of western Paris. He became the president of the textile association and was well-known to important politicians between the wars. Religion was of little concern to him. On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he would eat an apple. On Passover, always known in France as “Jewish Easter,” he would eat matzoh, not because of any religious belief but because matzoh was the holiday food. More basic to the Levys’ lives were the rounds of opera once a week and dinner parties in their elegant apartment, where they brought in musicians for small performances.
In 1940 the Levys once again had to leave Paris. This time they went south and became non-Jews. In Klaus Barbie's Lyons, the Levys—now the Picards—lived a quiet life. They bought a nearby plot of land and hired a peasant to work it, assuring themselves of a good food supply throughout the war. In the summers they vacationed in Argenton-sur-Creuse, a short drive away from