Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (25 page)

The government has indeed charged Zola with libel. I can barely believe that President Faure will permit such an attack on a distinguished man of letters, but it is all in the morning papers. Marcel is well pleased, pointing out that a trial, while difficult for M. Zola himself, may be for the best. After all, to win a libel judgment, the government must prove that what Zola says is untrue. “Zola’s trial may yet be Dreyfus’s retrial,” Marcel says.

I have not discussed the affair at all with Adrien. It is easy enough for him to avoid Dick, who is always off somewhere, and Marcel, who is not awake when his father breakfasts and lunches, and either out with his friends or sequestered in his room when his father returns in the evening. So, he need not discuss his
sons’ opinions with them, and I hold my tongue.

There are reports from the provinces of riots, mobs throwing stones through the windows of Jewish merchants.

Adrien will not speak to the boys. This petition has unmasked his disagreement with his sons; both their names have now appeared on the lists of intellectuals published in
L’Aurore
and they can no longer hide from each other that they are Dreyfusard and he not. Marcel and Dick are still busy obtaining signatures: the committee is optimistically hoping to collect ten thousand names before Zola’s trial begins the week after next. They are asking for a retrial of Alfred Dreyfus—nothing more, nothing less. Anatole France himself has signed, and Marcel is out every day meeting in the cafés with his friends to get more names.

It all exploded last night, when Marcel and Dick came home—if I were not so upset by their falling out with their father, I would be pleased to see them working on a project together; they usually spend so little time with each other. Dick was bold enough to ask his father if he would sign, and Adrien turned to me and said, “Your sons know my opinion on this matter. I will have nothing to do with this foolish nonsense.” He went off to his study and asked Jean to send in a tray for dinner. I have never heard him so cruel and so pompous. I have hidden from him my suspicions that Marcel and Dick are in the right camp, and tried to believe we are a family in which there is
room for real debates, that intellectual disagreements are not the same as familial discord. But we have reached our limits with this affair.

It was George Sand who wrote that revolutions have put one half of France in mourning for the other. We seem to have another revolution on our hands.

I ate my breakfast all alone this morning and was thankful at least for that. The boys had escaped early to the streets and the doctor now avoids me too. We are in the fourth day of his great campaign of silence, and yesterday’s events were so painful, I find it hard to describe them.

Dick was at home for lunch and Marcel had risen early enough to join us for once, so there we sat
en famille
with Adrien refusing to speak to either of them. He insisted on that ridiculous formula by which the persistently affronted engage in conversation with their enemies by the use of an intermediary. In this case, myself. “Jeanne, would you instruct your son Marcel that if he is going to take luncheon when he was in bed but thirty minutes before, he should certainly eat more slowly.” or “My dear wife, will you kindly tell Robert that I will be unable to offer him a seat in my cab when I return to the faculty this afternoon.” (Marcel blushed and put down his fork while Dick retorted directly that he is always happy to take the omnibus.)

Finally, I could bear it no longer, and tried to remonstrate with the doctor, suggesting that his campaign was unsustainable and gently expressing the
hope that we were a family in which there was room for rational debate. My intervention only angered him further and he replied most unkindly that while I might consider the arguments in favour of Dreyfus rational, they were in fact emotional and failed to grasp the political peril in which they placed the French state. He went on to explain that while he understood how one of my faith might feel great sympathy for a co-religionist… and there he never managed to finish his sentence, for I cried out that we were speaking not of religion but of justice, while Marcel and Dick were so outraged by their father’s words—or perhaps embarrassed by their mother’s uncharacteristic anger—that they both sprang up from the table. Marcel stumbled from the room without speaking, while Dick shouted, “Papa, how could you?” before he followed his brother.

So, I was left alone with the doctor, staring aghast both at him and how this miserable affair was now dividing us.

“Both in the nation and in the home, loyalty is the greatest virtue,” he told me, and I felt the bitter irony of his words ringing in my ears as I too withdrew from the room.

J’
ACCUSE
. The headline is indeed inflammatory, blazoned across the front page of the
L’Aurore
. I suppose the title was the invention of the paper’s radical editor, Georges Clemenceau, “the Tiger,” not Zola’s own choice, but they are nonetheless the two most famous words the novelist ever wrote. The document that followed clove France in two just as it separated the Prousts.

After a long and outraged recitation of the details of the case, Zola comes to his point. Citing generals, majors, and colonels by name, he accuses the army of a judicial error compounded by a violation of human rights for convicting Dreyfus on secret evidence that was withheld from his defence. He goes on to accuse the officers of a massive cover-up that included forged documents and fraudulent reports from corrupted handwriting experts, and of then acquitting Esterhazy when they knew him to be guilty. Zola’s essay fills six densely packed columns across the entire front page of
L’Aurore:
the print is small and tight, making it a challenge to read through the glass of the display case at the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan.

The Bibliothèque Nationale must have a copy of the
L’Aurore
from January 13, 1898, somewhere in its vaults, but I happen to have found it here, in the exquisite seventeenth-century mansion that houses France’s Museum of Jewish Art and History. Once an aristocrat’s house, then the city hall for what was then the Seventh Arrondissement, the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan was used to house workshops for local craftsmen from the mid-nineteenth century on. By the time the Dreyfus affair was raging those craftsmen were all Jews: the hotel is at the heart of the Marais, the old quarter of Paris’s Right Bank and the centre for Jewish gold and silversmithing in the city. Many of the building’s tenants disappeared during the Second World War and, in 1962, the City of Paris bought the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan and eventually turned it over to this brand-new national museum.

That much I gleaned from my Michelin guidebook before I set out for the Marais, thinking that this morning I would take a break from my translations and acquaint myself further with the rich culture from which Jeanne Proust sprang.

You still pass a clutch of posh jewellery shops on your way from the Métro to the museum. To actually enter the building, you must clear an intimidatingly antiseptic security room, walking through a labyrinthine metal detector while an impassive guard watches you from behind a double wall of glass: Jewish sites in Paris are frequently vandalized and occasionally subject to terrorist attack. Inside, I wander through rooms of art and artifacts, absent-mindedly admiring Italian wedding rings and a German Torah crown, a medieval gravestone, a coffered chest from the Renaissance, and a painting by Chagall. Soon I wind up here, in front of the display about Dreyfus, gazing at the photograph of the innocuous, bespectacled middle-aged man falsely accused of spying, and painstakingly reading through the front page of
L’Aurore
. While a few saw Zionism as the solution to anti-Semitism, the Dreyfus affair was, a text panel explains, an opportunity for most French Jews to stress their status as law-abiding, assimilated republicans—or perhaps I should translate that last word more subtly as loyal citizens of the Third Republic. They were upstanding Frenchmen and Frenchwomen; they were people like Jeanne Proust.

I wander further into the museum, following history into the twentieth century and come across an exhibit, still under construction, about the fate of Parisian Jews from 1941 to 1945. In the middle of the room a few display cases stand empty; around them the walls are covered with photographs. There are pictures of individuals, families, children, school groups, solemn-faced shopkeepers posing in front of their stores, prosperous burghers smiling gently for the camera, a rabbi with a black hat twice the size of his small face, an elegant woman in a long fur coat, a nervous couple in their wedding clothes. On a panel beside each
photo, the subjects are all identified and their histories traced. A tax record shows the shopkeeper has operated these premises on the Rue des Francs Bourgeois since 1923. A family file from the Police Prefect of the Seine records that he was born in 1892 in the Eleventh Arrondissement, enjoys French citizenship, married in 1925, and now lives at an address on the Rue de Malte, before it lists his wife and children. A file from Drancy notes that he arrived at the camp in August 1943, and was deported six weeks later on convoy number 27.

He is dressed in an apron and stands proudly on the threshold of his shop with his arms folded across his broad chest but, beside his fine figure, it is another image that catches my eye. It shows a row of about ten well-dressed men, some diffident, others haughty, photographed in a courtyard. It must be winter, for they are all wearing fine wool coats, some with fur collars.

One or two sport chic homburg hats while the rest expose heads of well-groomed hair to the cold. The caption explains that these are members of the Paris bar interned at Drancy in November 1942. Someone has thought to assemble them together and take their photograph on their arrival at the camp—out of misplaced pride for their professional status? out of gloating victory over their humiliation?—and there they stand, their prosperous and happier pasts still visible in their demeanour, their integrated, law-abiding republican selves not yet erased by hunger, despair, and death. Each one is identified, citing the same kind of files as those of the shopkeeper, and amongst their number I read a name I recognize: P. Bensimon.

My museum-induced languor evaporates and I turn my newly awakened attention to the text panel for this name. It
notes that, although there is no record of his or his family’s internment at Drancy, the P. Bensimon of the photograph is most probably Philippe Bensimon, a Paris lawyer who, according to tax records, was born in 1900 and lived at 22, Rue de Musset in the Sixteenth Arrondissement with a wife and child. Their fate is unknown.

Frantically, as though the photograph and the text might disappear before my eyes, I pull my notebook from my bag, and start to fumble desperately for a pen. I put one in here this morning, I must have a pen. Not this pocket, not here, no. Finally I locate it, hiding beneath my hairbrush. I flip open the notebook and start to scribble furiously.

S
ARAH SEGAL WAS STANDING
at the sink, washing up the breakfast dishes, when Daniel came into the kitchen to say goodbye for the day.

“What time will you be home?”

“Should be back at six.”

“Don’t be late.”

He ignored the admonition and kissed her.

“Bye.”

“You won’t be late, will you?”

“See you later,” he called over his shoulder.

“Daniel…”

The front door closed and he was gone.

An hour later Sarah set out herself, stepping into a day of sharp sunshine and newly warm air. The house in North Toronto where she and Daniel had lived for five years now was built in the Californian style, a large split-level with a sprawling expanse of flat roof. Daniel had judged it best, easier for Sarah and safer perhaps for their marriage, that they live at some distance from his parents, so they had moved east and north, settling on this well-established neighbourhood because they had fallen in love with this
surprisingly modern house. It had been squeezed onto a lot where a fire had destroyed the previous one, back before the war, and the rest of the street was older, made up of narrow two-and three-storey red-brick houses, shaded by mature maple trees. The comforting Ontario scene that lay before Sarah as she walked the four blocks out to Yonge Street was leisurely and secure. There was a wide street of fresh, flat asphalt with neither pothole nor bump to trouble the men as they drove to and from work in their big American sedans. It was lined by equally smooth sidewalks in which each square section was stamped with the date of a recent resurfacing. Each tidy house was set back a bit from the street, leaving room for a broad lawn now showing a rich green turf. And each front yard included a large tree whose branches reached out towards its neighbour across the way, creating a canopy that by midsummer would cover the whole street in a pleasant shade, but today, as the leaves were just now exploding from their buds, cast a refreshing dappled light. Sarah felt cheerful as she walked, running through her shopping list in her head, reminding herself to stop at the pharmacy for a few other requirements.

It was as she turned onto Yonge Street that her mood quickened and changed, growing deeper and less peaceful now. It was something about the smaller trees here, the sharp shadows cast by their thin branches and the wrought-iron grilles set into the pavement at their feet… or perhaps it was simply the warmth of the air that reminded Sarah fleetingly of something else, something past or something future. She felt a little urgency, an anticipatory frisson that might just be called spring.

On that day early in May 1964, a small miracle had occurred: white asparagus had arrived in the city. At the little
Italian greengrocer that Sarah increasingly patronized, Mr. Lombardi presented the vegetable to her with shy pride.