A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [94]
THE PLETZL, after losing so many people to deportation, never regained its original size. It was now only Rue des Rosiers and the few streets running off it. But new people were moving in. One of the first new groups, after the 1948 Middle East war, was the Egyptian Sephardim—strange Jews for the Pletzl, who spoke perfect French but no Yiddish and didn't eat the heavy potted food of central Europe.
The neighborhood always smelled of food. Inexpensive restaurants, like the ones before the war, opened in the narrow storefronts, the steam from dense Polish Jewish cooking drifting out doorways. In the 1950s these restaurants often closed after only a few months because of a lack of customers. In time, people learned that the Pletzl was now a smaller place and could no longer support a restaurant in every third door.
Horse-drawn ice wagons struggled down the narrow streets past black marketeers who bought silverware and gold and sold U.S. dollars. Next to Finkelsztajn's bakery was a shop not much wider than a doorway that sold live carp from a tank. Across the street from Finkelsztajn's, on Rue des Hospitalieres-Saint-Gervais, a block-long street off of Rue des Rosiers, an Ashkenazic family, Klapisch, opened a second carp store. A delivery truck would get to the corner and scoop out the scaly amber fish in big nets, dumping them into the tanks of the two stores. Young Henri Finkelsztajn would wait for the truck to leave and then run to the gutters, where he would find small carps that had slipped through the nets, smacking themselves uselessly against the curbstones. He would gather them up and bring them to his parents.
One block east of Finkelsztajn's, on the corner of Rue des Ecouffes, was the Korcarz bakery, with the same blue tile mosaic front, still owned by Icchok's Aunt Leah and her husband. In the 1950s, Korcarz's brother, a camp survivor, arrived and opened another bakery on the western end of the street next to the Blums’, whose charcuterie was the last of the original Alsatian Jewish shops. Korcarz's brother was still a traditional religious Jew, and his bakery was one of the few strictly kosher shops in the Pletzl.
Most of the buildings remained dilapidated, the blackened facades broken by fissures and wandering cracks, some of the buildings buttressed by huge wooden beams. The Finkelsztajns’ apartment above the bakery seemed spacious in comparison to most of their neighbors”. Large families stuffed themselves each evening into little studios. The other side of the Finkelsztajns’ building, the side with the carp store, was particularly deteriorated and dirty. Soon the carp store gave way to a small cafe owned by a Polish non-Jew. It catered to a poor alcoholic Polish clientele who got very drunk and often violent. Because the cafe lacked space, the fights usually took place in the street. From time to time the dead body of a Pole would be found in the hallway of the building. The police would come and remove it without asking many questions. A dead Pole on Rue des Rosiers didn't even make an item for the newspapers.
In the 1950s the cafe was taken over by a Belgian Jew who ran a small restaurant and whose son became one of Henri Finkel-sztajn's neighborhood friends. Henri had a happy childhood in the Pletzl, and the bad years were behind him, perhaps only recalled in a nervous stutter that held him back in school.
Small Orthodox storefront prayer rooms, shtibls, began reopen-i ng, but they rarely had the two dozen men that would make them seem full. Henri and his neighborhood friends were not religious but attended weekly instruction in a small Talmud-Torah on Rue des Ecouffes. They,