A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [93]
P A R T T H R E E
’68
“Living just to survive—that would never end well”
JIRI WEIL, Mendelssohn Is on the Roof
15
From
North Africa
THE MAJORITY OF FRENCH, BOTH JEWS AND NON-JEWS, had a deep-seated desire to pretend that World War II never happened. Most French Jews went back to being Frenchmen. Just as before the war, they were a diverse group, not well organized, and usually attached to the French Republican ideal of fitting into France. They spoke out from time to time, as happened during the Finaly affair, but they were not a political force. Nor did most of them want to be. Among French Jews it was widely believed that when Jews hold political power, it always leads to trouble. In 1954 the French government was headed by Pierre Mendes-France, an assimilated Jew who once proudly asserted, “I do not remember ever making a decision in my political life—and even less so in government—inspired by the interests of the Jewish community.” Yet when he resigned as head of government after a controversial seven months and seventeen days, during which he had withdrawn France from Indochina, started the autonomy process for Tunisia and Morocco, and won French ratification for the rearmament of West Germany, his final speech to the National Assembly was shouted down by deputies screaming “Sale Juifl” dirty Jew. The Jewish community had little reaction. Emmanuel Ewenczyk fatalistically explained, “When a Jew is in a highly responsible position in France, there is always some anti-Semitism heard.”
Emmanuel and Fania Ewenczyk had two daughters, one born in 1945, and one two years later. Emmanuel had kept the business in the Jewish garment area in the center of Paris. But as it prospered, he and his family moved to western Paris, to the sixteenth arron-dissement, where they had the kind of ornate Paris home that is surrounded by swirls —in oriental carpets, in gilded molding on the furniture, in bas-relief on the walls and ceilings, in chandeliers, and even etched in the crystal. In one generation they had been able to rise from poor eastern immigrants in the garment district to the assimilated grand bourgeois life like that of the Altmanns.
The Altmanns were raising three children in a nearby western Paris neighborhood, an area of manicured streets and grand turn-of-the-century buildings with sculpted detail. The steel trading business had to be carefully managed in a fast-growing but unstable world marketplace, and their lives as affluent Parisians, not much different from non-Jews of their economic class, had resumed. Once a week, a rabbi would come to the children's school and teach them Hebrew for one hour. Such things were important, but they were not the center of life.
The Ewenczyks sent their children to an afternoon Jewish school, a Talmud-Torah, for a few hours a week. But their passion was Zionism, not religion. Atypical of French Jewry, the Zionists were organized and rented huge Parisian halls for mass rallies, which Fania and Emmanuel always attended. Emmanuel was consumed with his fast-growing business, but Fania missed the activism of their Resistance days. Most of their old Resistance group from Grenoble was now in Israel. In fact, most of the real activists in French Jewry, the ones who wanted to remember and did not think like could be put back the way it had been, had gone to Israel.
Less than ten years after the war, the Jewish population of France was approaching the 340,000 prewar population. France had opened its borders to Jewish refugees, and 55,000 DPs moved there. The immigrants gravitated toward the Pletzl or the Rue Bleue area, but French Jews lived throughout