A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [97]
16
In Paris
IF SUCH THINGS CAN BE PREORDAINED, THE FLNKELSZTAJNS seemed fated to be bakers. Even if he didn't have to work in a basement anymore, Icchok Finkelsztajn still had not wanted to be in a bakery. Now his son, Henri, was working there with him. Although talkative and sociable, Henri's stutter had made school difficult, and he stopped his education at age 15. Icchok wanted his son to do something better and sent him to apprentice in the garment district. Looking for a way out of the bakery himself, Icchok bought a small hotel on Rue de Rivoli, the wide boulevard nearby. But it did not make a profit, and Henri gave up the garment trade to rescue the hotel.
More by instinct than design, the hotel was run like a casual family boardinghouse with a small group of regulars who were charged low rates. One of the regulars was an American soldier whose life's dream was to own a store, even though he seemed incapable of navigating through simple arithmetic. The soldier bought anything with francs that he could sell for dollars. It seemed to Henri that almost everyone cheated the American on the exchange rate, but the rate was so good that the soldier made money anyway. Eventually, to his great excitement, the soldier opened his first store in Fontainebleau, near U.S. Army headquarters, and he invited Henri to look. It was an American supermarket—something unknown in France at that time. Henri was amazed by all the space, the aisles, all the different products and the little metal wagons for wheeling purchases around the store. Henri, who had always thought this American incapable of doing anything, could not help but be impressed by this huge orderly market. It also made an impression on the U.S. Army, which called the soldier in for a talk about his sideline and then sent him back to the United States.
The Finkelsztajn hotel did not fare much better, and it soon closed. Henri went to work for his father in the bakery once again. He hated the work as much as Icchok, but he enjoyed being with his father, whose rippling muscles and good spirits betrayed a love for physical labor that Henri had not inherited. In 1958, Henri married Honorine Paul-Jean, who was from Madagascar, the end of the earth his father had talked about running off to only seven years earlier. Neither Honorine nor Henri claimed to be religious. Nevertheless, because Honorine had only one Jewish grandparent, they worried about their children being legally Jewish. Honorine submitted to the long, arduous process of religious conversion. They named their son Sacha, after the little brother of Henri's mother, the boy shot in the road near Kielce by the Nazis.
THE SONS OF RAHMIN NAOURI, a famous rabbi from the Algerian city of Bone, started working at the Klapisch carp store on Rue des Hospitalieres-Saint-Gervais. They did not think the carp business was very interesting and, instead, they decided to sell smoked salmon. Although this is a traditional Ashkenazic food, lox, it was not known on Rue des Rosiers because the people there were too poor to afford it. Non-Jewish French people knew nothing about smoked salmon, either, except for a handful of the elite, who paid dazzling prices. Buying a German machine that sliced and wrapped, lowering the price just a little, the Naouri brothers believed that saumon fume could become one of those French luxury products like lobster and foie gras for holidays and birthdays. They got the trade unions to buy enormous quantities for union galas, especially New Year's Eve. Soon every blue-collar union