The Fractalist Page 5

  The Jews’ situation in Poland was clearly desperate, but what could be done? Join one of the Communist parties whose members or sympathizers often marched down the streets? Retire into a world of prayer and hope for the best? Join one of the Zionist parties, ranging from peaceful to ostentatiously Fascist? Seek freedom elsewhere by emigrating?

  My parents had every reason not to be soft on communism. They had been caught in Kharkov, in eastern Ukraine, during the bloody civil war, when the Whites and the Reds alternated in taking deadly control. Szolem lectured on several occasions in Russia—one of them leading to the momentous dinner party in 1930—and reported what he saw. We knew about the purges, though the worst ones occurred after we fled to Paris. I also remember being invited to a Zionist outing meant to proselytize to the very young. When Mother heard me report their views, she said they were plain Fascists and forbade me to see them again.

  Something had to be done, soon, but every option carried a high risk and cost. My family regarded every radical solution with outspoken suspicion, and listening to all those endless scenarios and arguments marked me for life.

  A High-School Freshman Saves My Life

  My brilliant cousin Mirka, a year older than I, faced her own set of difficulties. The revived Poland deeply cared for elementary schools, but high schools were less essential. She placed first on the fiercely difficult entrance exam to the only suitable girls’ high school in Warsaw, but was bounced from the Jewish quota by others with better-connected parents. Informed, Szolem spoke to colleagues in Paris. Letters to influential contacts in Warsaw went up, up, and up—and Mirka was admitted.

  What mighty person “fixed” Mirka’s admission? He was Poland’s most political and powerful mathematician, Wacław Sierpiński, whose role in my life, always indirect and never planned, cannot be overestimated. Around 1920, he induced Szolem to move to France, and he influenced my work in 1970.

  My turn to take that entrance exam was coming in 1936, and the number of boys’ high schools was tiny. In addition, Jósef Piłsudski (1867–1935), Poland’s preeminent political figure, died, and politics took a sharp turn for the worse for the Jews. A pitiful, farcical, and scary Colonel Beck became foreign minister and boasted publicly that he could outwit Hitler.

  Should we uproot with no thought of return? The timing was perfect because of my age, but dreadful because Father’s position in Paris was precarious and Mother would forsake her profession and income. But Mirka’s experience was the last straw: Poland was not the country my parents wanted for their sons. The decision was made.

  We Pull Up Roots and Move to France

  Our last weeks in Warsaw dragged on. I don’t recall why; perhaps the visa was not yet signed, or our tenement in Paris was not yet available. But our lease had lapsed, and our former landlord was in a relentless hurry to renovate the place for his son. An acolyte paid peanuts to Mother, dismantled what I viewed as an elegant partition, and took it away on a handcart. We doubled up in Raya’s apartment/surgery on Ulica Nowolipki, and left with what seemed an immense amount of luggage—including heavy feather comforters, essential in the cold Warsaw winters but not in Paris.

  This episode was not only my last major experience of Poland but the first in which raw anti-Semitism hit me directly. This recollection differs from those of most survivors and shows only that I was a sheltered child. Polish anti-Semitism, official or popular, indirectly set every parameter in my life outside the family. Before TV and with little radio, the outside world was discussed interminably, but most of the time was distant, almost abstract. Trying hard, I don’t recall Léon complaining about ill treatment in his Catholic school. I remember only one instance of being jostled and insulted, when on a movie outing our class sat next to another from a parochial school.

  Before everything they had dreaded became horribly concrete in Poland, my parents’ bold scheme had worked. We were in the South of France, looking and sounding native, and with many loyal friends among the locals. The foreign wars felt far away, except for the anguish faced by families of the war prisoners. The most significant struggle was the civil war in France between local political factions.

  How did Father manage to get a visa for his wife and sons? Frankly, I don’t recall, but Léon once mentioned that we benefited from a short-lived program to reunite families broken by economic hardship.

  Of the people we knew, we alone moved to France and survived. Most procrastinated—until times turned awful. Only two Warsaw friends survived: Mrs. Braude who lived just above us lost her husband but came to Paris after the war with her daughter, who was my age. She called Mother and they became friends again. Others had been detained by their precious china, or inability to sell their Bösendorfer concert grand piano, or unwillingness to abandon the park view from their windows. Mother was horrified by their stories but listened stone-faced.

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  Adolescent in Paris, 1936–39

  AT THE INTERNATIONAL RAIL TERMINAL IN WARSAW, family, colleagues, neighbors, friends, former patients, and mere acquaintances jostled for time to wish Mother all the best. Each left a small gift, often a box of Polish chocolate. All wished they could come along. An endless and emotional good-bye.

  Overnight, I had the first of many experiences of charter trains, the precursor of charter planes, full of refugees. Cheap, but old and slow, it followed an odd schedule, and often stopped so a full-fare express train could speed by. Across Nazi Germany, it was padlocked so nobody could slip in or out.

  At the Gare du Nord in Paris, Father was waiting with Aunt Fanny, his sister, who lived nearby. An emotional but sober welcome. To follow Father and provide a future for her children, Mother had given up the prestige and income of an established physician, a nice apartment, and altogether a world where she was well rooted, known, respected, and independent. At age fifty she had chosen to be a lonely housewife living in a foreign slum. This contrast still makes my heart ache.

  Mother’s decision was taken “cold,” by rational choice, and was carried out two full years before Hitler’s army marched into Vienna, then Prague, on its way to Warsaw—and Paris.

  By pulling up their deep roots in a community that only a few years later vanished in smoke, my lucid and decisive parents saved us all and earned the utmost gratitude. But pulling up roots is never a natural process, even under the best of circumstances. The last community where I did not have to question “belonging” was my childhood’s Warsaw.

  The France that was to stamp me indelibly was about to be hit by a whirlwind, a collapse, and a foreign occupation that dwarfed the ends of the two Napoleonic follies (the Cossacks camping in Paris on the Champ de Mars in 1815 and the 1871 Prussian occupation). In 1936, France was also about to be engulfed in a bitter civil war, far milder than but not completely unlike the Wars of Religion and the French Revolution.

  Father Shows His Family the Very Best of Paris

  On our first free evening in Paris, we took the long walk all the way from the city’s downscale east side to its upscale west, ending at the Arc de Triomphe. The small number of horses and the large number of cars made me realize that cars retired in Paris began a new life in Warsaw. I learned how to pronounce “Renault” (“Renoh,” more or less). In Warsaw, it was “assimilated” by being changed to “Renlaut.”

  On Sundays, we were introduced to wonders: the Louvre, the old science museum, the Latin Quarter. Surely, Warsaw had museums, but I cannot remember visiting one.

  Music was not on the main program, but some time later we went to the Odéon theater for a performance of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, with incidental music by Edvard Grieg—in particular, for Solveig’s aria, which Mother loved to sing.

  Father’s favorite painter was Titian, and every new Titian I see (grimy at its home in Venice or shockingly clean in London) brings to mind that first visit to the Louvre. When Greek and Roman statuary began to be dug out and long-reigning dynasties started collecting great art, the pope chose first, followed by the king of France, the
n by English, Russian, and German royalty and amateurs. This is presumably why the Greek statues in the Vatican Museum seem unrealistically “freshly minted,” while their kin in the Louvre miss a nose or an arm, and their kin elsewhere miss far more than that.

  Unlike the Louvre, the old science museum on rue Saint-Martin has no clearly marked boundaries, but merges into a faded shopping district. Its core is the former Monastère de Saint-Martin-des-Champs, a counterpart to London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields and a reminder that in medieval Paris fields began around where the Pompidou Center is today. The first bicycle (low, wooden, and with no pedals, propelled by feet pushing the road), the first motorcar (a monster powered by steam that arguably inspired the creator of thermodynamics, physicist Sadi Carnot), the first airplane to actually, if very briefly, fly (Clément Ader’s batlike contraption), the first plane to cross the English Channel (Louis Blériot’s)—these and many comparable marvels of human ingenuity were hidden under thick soot in this dark Gothic-era abbatial church. The institution housing the museum was founded in 1794. Its name, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), is old-fashioned but tells it all: here the nation preserves the originals of its greatest practical thinkers’ greatest achievements. That first visit to the CNAM left an imprint, and I make it a point to return there every so often in a kind of pilgrimage to my childhood.

  On our third Sunday outing in Paris, Father took us to the Latin Quarter, on the academic Left Bank, situated on the steep hill dedicated to the patron saint of Paris, the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. We saw the works: the boulevard Saint-Michel, the Luxembourg Gardens, the doors of the Sorbonne and other universities, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, and the Panthéon—that “big statement” building. And Father made a special point of passing behind the Panthéon by that small and discreet entrance to the lodge—the Boîte à Claques—that reads

  ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE

  in faded gilt letters. Now the school has moved away, but the sign remains. The hope that I would cross that threshold as a student was what sustained Father. He was in seventh heaven when—nine years later—I became a polytechnicien. Like the CNAM, the school dates to 1794. Long after Father died, I was a special guest of both during their bicentennials.

  This reunion with Father and those introductions to the landmarks of Paris often come to mind. Once again, each time my heart aches. Who would dare begrudge a man who, compared to his youngest brother, had achieved so little. Father was introducing his wife and sons to things he perceived as being among the most admirable and promising on earth. Geographically, they were only steps away from our tenement, but culturally they lay across a broad and deep divide he desperately wanted his sons to cross.

  He must have also felt the need to reintroduce himself to his sons and his wife of twenty years. For five long years, he could afford only a few visits home, and earlier he had been consumed by efforts to help his Warsaw business survive the Depression.

  Every day was a brand-new beginning in every way.

  Belleville, a Slum in the Nineteenth Arrondissement

  Mother was not allowed to practice dentistry in Paris, so every penny was needed for the new business Father was building. Before we joined him, he found a suitable tenement in an old slum called Belleville (Beautiful Town)—a logement rather than an appartement.

  Many slums’ kitschy names are commercial. But this had been an old village northeast of the city center, on the sunny southwest slope of a steep hill just beyond the fortifications that, until 1860, marked the city limits. Belleville is in the east end of Paris, at the bottom in terms of prestige—and far from the promise of its travel brochure name. In Paris, like in London, the prevalent winds blow from the west, so the nice area is the west end.

  The rue de Chaumont was (and remains) a small dead-end street in the middle of a beat-up area long slated for urban renewal (which came decades later). At numbers 5–7 stood a clean and relatively nice building. Having found it, Father spoke to the concierge, who was also the owner, and in effect, he was given an exam.

  Reassured that we were not homeless derelicts but a middle-class, down-at-the-heels family, the owner let us rent a flat: two narrow rooms end to end, railroad-style, from street to courtyard. One was the parents’ room, filled by the dining table and bed; the other was the sons’ room, filled by study tables and beds. A bit later, space was made for Mother’s elder brother, who had fled Lithuania; he was ill and did not live long. Our kitchen was the size of a cupboard, and on every second landing between floors, a Turkish toilet serviced four flats. We had no hot running water and no bathroom.

  Other neighborhood houses had courtyards teeming with immigrants, but we were strongly discouraged from socializing there. The owner of our building liked quiet tenants who did not linger in the courtyard. We knew hardly anyone in Paris, so our social life dropped overnight from that of a big extended family to almost nothing.

  Father chose a place a short walk from the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, an amazing landmark that proper Parisians from the nice west end would not visit. Its site used to be a convenient stone quarry for Paris. Exhausted and nearing collapse, the quarry had been abandoned. The metro line crossing the park ran through an underground covered bridge supported by pillars standing on solid stone. The late-nineteenth-century architects of the park turned its gutted terrain into an asset: a lake with a high island “mountain” faced with concrete and graced on its peak by a pseudo-Greek temple with a panoramic view of the best and the worst, depending on the direction. The park was kept so meticulously clean that we could play there, as we had previously played in the Saxon Garden in Warsaw. I still recall having great fun building a big dam across a “river” raging along a gutter, and then hearing some well-dressed passersby comment, “How disgusting.”

  The park’s broad lawns had borders of partly overlapping arches, each about a sixth of a circle, and with a curious knobby surface I found mystifying. Years later, my first visit to Japan revealed very similar arches—in bamboo! The Paris designers seem to have reproduced the texture of bamboo in more durable pig iron. So the Buttes Chaumont is called an English garden, but in fact part of the inspiration is Japanese. The same is also true of the corresponding park on the Left Bank, the Parc Montsouris, right next to which, many years later, I was to purchase my first apartment in Paris. The Buttes Chaumont area had a surprisingly rural feel with several blocks filled with models for suburban houses. I imagine that standardized developments were growing and that to exhibit their wares the builders had chosen the neighborhood accessible by metro where land was cheapest.

  For a while after the war, my official home address remained 5–7, rue de Chaumont, but I did not live there. Last time I passed by to check, the area immediately surrounding the Parc des Buttes Chaumont had been built up, a solid and fully gentrified island—as expected for attractive spots in Paris. The rue de Chaumont has also improved, but our old house has not much changed. Most people in the street are less derelict than those I recall.

  Back to the tiny tenement. When Mother first entered it, she sobbed uncontrollably. By the next day, she had recovered control over herself and the household. Parents and sons were forbidden to speak Polish, and it worked beyond belief. Mother brushed up on her (already fine) school French and took out books from every one of the excellent public libraries in the area. (French books being mostly paperbacks, each library had them bound in its way, and the libraries could be distinguished by the style and quality of the bindings. I soon noticed that some older books were copyrighted “in every country, including the Lowlands.” The reason was that, as late as the 1900s, the center of piracy for French books was virtuous Holland.) In no time, Mother wrote nearly flawless French and spoke it with almost no accent. My parents never fit the cliché of immigrants who depend on their children to communicate in the new country.

  The first time Mother went out, she commented on the small number of pregnant women. Before she went shopping, rumor had forewarned
her that Parisians carried unwrapped bread in their bare hands. But she was equally shocked to see meat displayed in open stalls in the heavy traffic of the narrow avenue Secrétan. It did not look very appetizing, but it was healthy and she got used to it. Due to the constant fear of epidemics in Warsaw, the shops she had gone to were far more sanitary than those in Paris. Years later, I heard of an additional reason. Before routine refrigeration, the slaughterhouses of Paris were close to nice neighborhoods. After the best meat had been sold there, the remaining pieces moved down the social ladder, joining less desirable fresh pieces. When the meat reached the slums, its travels showed.

  One day, Father lugged in an obsolete multivolume Larousse Encyclopédie, together with decades of bound volumes of its updates. In no time, I read them from cover to cover.

  When the German advance toward Paris triggered the debacle of May 1940, my parents abandoned everything and walked hundreds of miles to join their sons in Tulle where we had been sent earlier for safety. As soon as Paris was liberated in 1944, Father rushed back. Our old flat was rented, but another tenant who had stayed behind had been deported shortly before the liberation. We could have his tenement until he came back. He didn’t. Cleaning a tile in the kitchen, Mother found it was loose. Hidden under it she found a replica of a gold twenty-franc coin used during the reign of Emperor Napoléon III (1852–70). Had the previous tenant taken it along, he might have purchased his survival.

  French Elementary School