This is an older post, but one that I love to revisit as a way to memorialize my father Emile's life and the journey he took to arrive in the United States as a Jewish teenager fleeing Nazi-occupied France. In this time of trial in our nation, where politicians seek to use their positions to engage in mutual venial squabbling and punishing of "enemies" in Congress and the administration, I return instead to the purity of the moment my father found true freedom at last in the US.
But I am also delighted to write that I discovered an attractive website called Critical Past, which captures random films from historical events. In my case, Critical Past had a movie of my father turning around and smiling. I started crying instantly. I knew this was when his life would change, from his past life as a dancer in the Paris Ballet opera house to something entirely different and new. He would become an essential professor of African Languages and Literature. He would publish volumes of poetry in French and English, marry twice, travel to Africa,13 countries along the coast, meet with many emerging African writers, and be an influential force through the journal he co-founded, Présence Africaine.
Can you imagine the most mythical moment of your childhood? That moment when everything changes, and you know that you will be profoundly changed in the future, that your life as you once knew it would be over. My father, Emile, was born in Paris. His father is an American ex-patriot, and his mother is a beautiful young Jewish woman anxious to leave her working-class origins behind. They lived in a fashionable area of Paris, and my father and his sister Rosine studied ballet at the Paris Ballet Opera House. By the time he was a teenager, my father was on his way to becoming a principal dancer.
Then WWII happened, and the Occupation of France in collaboration with the Vichy Government happened, and my father's life as a dancer was shattered. They were Jews and no longer welcomed at the Opera House. For the last six months of his life in Paris, not one friend would speak to him -- they would cross the street to avoid him for fear of his pariah status rubbing off on them. My father rose early in the morning before curfew and slipped through streets unseen to be first in the bread lines.
My Grandfather had been out of the country on business when the Germans invaded and could not return to France. However, he was able to provide the children with American passports through the embassy. My grandmother and the children traveled to Portugal, where they were promised passage on a cargo ship, the SS Excambion, that was carrying several dignitaries (Madame Curie's daughter on her way to try and convince the US to enter the war on behalf of the Jews, and Isaiah Berlin and his future wife) and many Jewish children traveling alone to relatives in the US.
The photo above is a still from a short film of the refugees arriving in NYC in January 1941. Someone sent me the link to the film, knowing my father's history, and asked, "See anyone you know?" In the opening shot, two young teens turn to face the camera, and there they are -- my father, fifteen years old, and his 14-year-old sister. Later in the film, there is a close-up of the two of them leaning out to take in the sight of NYC and the Statue of Liberty. (If you click the link, you will see the short film.)
This moment was critical to my father; he spoke of it often and included it in his poetry. So how amazing is it that some 80 years later and 29 years after his death, this film surfaces, and I can see him again as a young man leaning into the sun, into his future? Yeah, you know I cried when I saw it.