This has been such a fertile time looking toward the past. Daily, thanks to my cousin Earl (an excellent genealogist), another chapter in the narrative history of my family opens up. I should write a novel -- well, maybe stories about my family. Here is a bit of news that Earl sent me this morning about Madeleine Brittman, my paternal grandmother, born in Paris to Romanian-Jewish immigrant parents:
Over the years, I tried to find Madeleine's birth in Paris in arrondissements 4, 8, 9, 10, & 11 on the right bank and 5, 14, & 15 on the left bank before I struck gold last week with 18. Montmartre - the 18th - is in the furthest district due north in Paris and includes Sacré Coeur Basilica...When your grandmother was born there in 1904, Montmartre was "the" hotbed of artistic activity; home to Picasso, Gris, Modigliani, the Nabis, and, of course, writers such as Apollinaire and Jarry, the Naturalists and the Symbolists. -- The 18th wasn't the traditional district for immigrants or provincials unless they had Bohemian souls. --- It's fascinating to think about your Romanian great-grandparents living there at that emotional time!
Indeed. My grandmother was one to take chances even when the habit later warred with her desire to be a model bourgeois matron. She had an affair with a married man who lived nearby and gave birth as a single mother to my father, Emile. She was brave. I try to imagine her in that Bohemian world -- before she married my grandfather -- wanting to make something of her life that was very different from her six sisters, who would remain in France within the close-knit family while she ventured forth.
But she was also indomitable -- the youngest of seven sisters, she fled France under Vichy (they were Jews) alone with her two children and came to the States to find her American husband. Years later, after the divorce (she never remarried), she settled in a tiny, tiny Los Angeles apartment (complete with a Murphy bed) and was a governess for Liz Taylor's children (taught them French), and later worked as a receptionist at a doctor's office. She worked into her 80s and saw a doctor only once after 1935, after a minor stroke at 85. She lived well into her 90s, had her hair done regularly (ala Nancy Reagan -- whom Madeleine pronounced as "Tres charmant." Politics just wasn't her thing!), and never, never, never lost her thick French accent or her peculiar habit of transforming French into English with startling results. She once told me that she had made a "raped carrot" salad for a luncheon (her Frangelized version of the French "carrots rappé," meaning grated carrots). She walked almost five miles daily and revealed to me that her good health was due to her being a "street walker."
But can you imagine the most mythical moment of your childhood? The moment when everything changes, and you know that you will be profoundly different in the future, your life as you once knew it would be over. My father Emile was born in Paris -- his father an American ex-patriot, and his mother a beautiful young Jewish woman -- anxious to leave her working-class origins behind her. 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 were 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. But he could 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 movie, 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 at about 15 and his sister at about 14. 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 very important 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.
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
