A Chosen Few (43 page)

The attack was in July 1980. In 1990, Nasser Al-Saied was set free. The Belgian government denied it had made a deal, but prior to Nasser Al-Saied’s release, a Belgian family, the Houtekins, were taken hostage by Arabs. The Antwerp Jews immediately saw what was coming and wrote the government, saying they knew a trade would be proposed and asking the government to reject it. The foreign minister wrote back that such a swap would never be made. But elections were coming, and this typical wholesome Belgian family, the Houtekins, were in the newspapers every day until one day, miraculously, they were released. Soon after, Nasser Al-Saied, the Palestinian soldier, was himself released for good behavior.

I
srael was still a great place to be young, and when the Six-Day War was over, the demonstrations and fundraising finished, Daniel Altmann went back to his northern kibbutz. Palestinian children would occasionally throw a rock, but you could still have fun. A group of friends from the kibbutz volunteered for an archaeological dig in the Greek Orthodox sector of Jerusalem. Digging in the bottom of a pit, they found oil lamps, not all of which they turned over to the archaeologist. In addition to these souvenirs they would save small shards of pottery that were of no archaeological value and sell them by the kilo to Arab merchants, who ground them up and made “oil lamps from the time of Herod” to sell to tourists.

But the Altmanns did not raise their children just to have fun, and so Daniel returned to Paris, where he attended the prestigious Paris Institute for Political Science Studies, “Sciences-Po.” In this leading university he met many of the Jewish intellectuals who a decade later would emerge as key figures in the Socialist government of Sciences-Po graduate François Mitterrand. Daniel then attended an elite officers’ school and afterward, served as an officer in Berlin. For major holidays he would go to a West Berlin synagogue that was packed with American soldiers. After a two-year tour as a French officer, he joined the family steel business in northern France, where he had no contact at all with Judaism.

He had never lived much of a Jewish life, but in Valenciennes, a town near the Belgian border—where, for the first time, he was completely cut off from other Jews—a question came to him: “Am I a Jew or not?” It seemed to him, at 26, that he had to make a choice. He had behind him the whole history of the Blums, the Lévys, and the Altmanns. He thought about his great-grandfather, who had believed he was an established businessman until the Dreyfus case forced him to flee; about his grandfather, who lived the good life in Paris until the Nazis came and he had to sell his business; about his uncle, who was deported despite his changed name; and about the way his parents had raised him and his two sisters to be affluent Parisians who only occasionally entertained the idea of Jewishness. You can’t be a little bit Jewish, can you? Aren’t you either Jewish or not Jewish? Isn’t that what we had all discovered by accident?

Daniel became active in Jewish fundraising activities, and soon he was president of a group called New Leadership, an organization of people like him—young Jews from wealthy families working to raise money for Israel. Daniel organized visits to Israel, going back himself several times. More than fun and funny pottery, this work had become a way for him to feel Jewish, feel involved with Jewish life. But did giving money, raising funds, mean being involved in Judaism? He was still troubled, and one day at a Jewish wedding he began talking about this to a man he met. The man said, “Listen, if you want to search a bit, call me.”

Altmann began spending one night a week studying the Mishnah, the first part of the Talmud. After a year his teacher said he needed a more advanced teacher and sent him to Rue Pavée, to the dank and moldy building next to the Rue Pavée synagogue where Chaim Rottenberg and his wife Rifka lived. On the top floor, in a large threadbare room with worn floorboards, Rav Rottenberg taught a small group of men on Thursday nights. They were the people he had somehow grabbed to join his fast-growing community.

In 1978, the year that Altmann met him, Rottenberg was still a man of boundless energy, a rigorous, uncompromising enforcer. Before Passover that year, he had gone to Strasbourg to inspect the matzoh makers, storming into the factory in his black coat, asking questions, looking around, making sure the matzoh was baked in no more than eighteen minutes because, it is thought, leavening could take place if it were baked any longer. The matzoh dough
was being mixed in a huge vat, and Rottenberg had to climb up a ladder to peer in and make sure everything looked kosher and chametz free. Preoccupied by the inspection, he lost his balance and fell off the ladder.

To Rifka, this was the fatal fall, the fall from the matzoh vat, somehow God’s will. In truth, the doctors examining him after the accident discovered he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Thereafter he slowly weakened.

It took four years of study to turn Daniel Altmann, the wealthy assimilated Parisian, into a devout Orthodox Jew. He decided to marry and start a traditional family. Not exactly like Levy Kohane, who had never been in the company of a girl, thirty-year-old Altmann went to the synagogue, to the study group, the cheder, and asked for a suitable woman to marry. The community found him Lynda Abitan, a woman from a deeply religious Marrakesh family. Lynda’s father had died when she was very young, and her mother had raised six children by herself, working in a factory, making sure they were all religious and well married. Lynda was the outspoken, independent, and still-unmarried one. Her mother was beginning to worry about her. She was religious, but she just didn’t seem to be conforming to the Orthodox mold.

Thirteen years had passed since Lazare Bouaziz married Suzy Ewenczyk. More than half the Sephardic marriages were now with Ashkenazim, and it was no longer an issue that was given great importance. French Jewry had a Sephardic majority that had strongly colored the community and was thoroughly blending with it. The two groups were no longer distinct. In January 1981, the same year that Altmann married Lynda Abitan, René Sirat became the first North African Grand Rabbi of France. Much was made in the general press of the fact that this ruling Ashkenazic bastion was now falling to the Sephardim, as though the struggle for control of the community had been won by the North Africans. But Sirat’s first official act the day he became Grand Rabbi was to go to the Soviet embassy and request a visa to visit Soviet Jews. The application was denied, but Sirat continued to apply pressure on the Soviets and to make sure that French Jewry did not forget about the struggle of Jews in the Soviet Union. Given the numbers and activism of Sephardic rabbis, it may be a long time before there is another Ashkenazic Grand Rabbi, but the ascent of Sirat may also have been the last time anyone would ever give it a thought. Even separate congregations were becoming increasingly rare.

The Altmanns were not concerned that Daniel was marrying a Sephardi, and in fact they greatly admired Lynda’s mother as a tough, hard-working, industrious woman. One of Daniel’s sisters had also married a Moroccan, and no one had seen that match as an issue. But after ten years, when that marriage failed, even happily married Daniel suspected that differences between Ashke-nazim and Sephardim were to blame. “Matching an Ashkenazic woman with a Sephardic man is a big problem,” he observed.

In 1981 the issue between the Altmanns and the Abitans was not Sephardim versus Ashkenazim. It was assimilation. Lynda was already a little wild, and it was worrisome to her deeply religious mother to see her marrying into this bourgeois French family. Even though Daniel had studied hard and had turned traditional, they worried about it lasting. Lynda’s mother loved the Rue Pavée synagogue, because she claimed it was the only one in Paris that had never committed the outrage of having organ music. The other Altmanns rarely went to any synagogue at all. When they did, it was to the “liberal” synagogue on Rue Copernic, over in their expensive sixteenth arrondissement. At Copernic it was not just the music that was untraditional; there was not even separate seating for men and women.

The Altmanns had been eager for their son to get married. He had been “fooling around” for long enough. But his marriage to Lynda Abitan exposed them to a strange world that they did not like. They had tried not to say too much when their son grew a beard and started studying. But it was not until Daniel’s wedding that they saw what his new world was really like. At the wedding not only did men and women sit apart, they did not even touch. They did not even dance together. Instead, Daniel would dance with the other bearded men while the women were off in another corner. What century was this all from? Modern successful Jews did not act like this. Who had influenced him? Who had changed him? Was he really going to live like strange oppressed people from some faraway backward country?

T
O LIVE A TRADITIONAL
J
EWISH LIFE
means to live in a community centered around a rabbi and a synagogue that has to be within walking distance. But to live within walking distance of Rue Pavée was increasingly difficult. The Marais was getting refurbished. New museums were opening to draw tourists. Bit by bit, the old buildings
that used to be propped up with thick timbers running into the narrow streets were getting reconstructed, resurfaced, carefully divided into apartments and sold for prices previously unknown in eastern Paris. The city had timed the Marais renovation well, and the buildings were becoming ready just as real estate prices were starting to rapidly inflate. It had closed the central market, Les Halles, and the entire historical center was being reworked. The Marais was no longer a working-class, commercial area. There was no longer a lively market to drift toward late at night. The working-class residents were being moved to the suburbs, while the buildings that had been working-class tenements for centuries were being turned into luxury apartments. The official claim was that the original tenants would be given opportunities to move back to their old neighborhood. But working-class people did not want to move into a deluxe neighborhood that offered high prices and few jobs.

The Altmanns—Daniel and Lynda—were not working-class people, and they could afford to live in the Marais, buying a large, two-floor apartment with a terrace a few minutes away from the synagogue. There was enough space to comfortably raise a large family. But most of the fifty families that belonged to Rottenberg’s community were not wealthy international businessmen and had to find apartments ever farther away. Many had to walk forty minutes or an hour to attend Sabbath services on Rue Pavée.

The Pletzl, too, was being shaved away. It was now no more than Rue des Rosiers, Rue des Ecouffes, and Rue Pavée. It was becoming a curiosity for tourists, mentioned in guidebooks. You could buy a little pastry at Finkelsztajn’s or some Sephardic treats from the Journos’. Or you could have lunch at Jo Goldenberg’s, which had been one of the last surviving steamy one-room eateries in the Pletzl but was now expanded and cleaned up for foreign visitors.

Like many of the old Pletzl generation, Icchok Finkelsztajn had left for a better neighborhood before the renovation had gotten under way. It was this migration of the old working class that had opened up much of the property to renovation. In 1971, Icchok retired, and he and Dwojra moved to the north of the city behind Montmartre, where for a reasonable price they could rent a more spacious apartment in a nineteenth-century building that was not collapsing. In 1974, Leah Korcarz died, and the blue-tiled bakery on the corner of Rue des Ecouffes was sold out of the Finkelsztajn family. Henri, who had taken over his father’s bakery, was the only
family member still in the Pletzl, although he and his wife also now lived away from the crowded center. The apartment above the bakery could be used as an additional work space, making it possible to expand the offerings of foods to keep pace with the Journos across the street.

D
URING THE
1970s, France experienced a fashion called “forties revival.” Once De Gaulle and his official version of World War II faded from power, there was a great burst of interest in what had taken place in France during the war. Books were being written and movies produced. Film director Marcel Ophuls made
The Sorrow and the Pity
, a television documentary on daily life during the war in the provincial town of Clermont-Ferrand. The soon-to-be president of France, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, happened to be from that region, and his family happened to be among many that the film showed in various degrees of collaboration and acquiescence. While the film was a sensation in New York, it never made it on to French television, which was state-controlled, until a decade later, when Giscard was defeated by François Mitterrand.

The more French people looked into the 1940s, the more toxic the atmosphere became. In 1978 a journalist for
L’Express
went to Spain to interview Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the one-time head of Vichy’s Office for Jewish Affairs. Darquier told
L’Express
that “only lice were gassed at Auschwitz.” He then proceeded to deny that there had been a Holocaust. This was the same year that, while the Institute for Historical Review was coming into being in California, a crackpot professor in Lyons named Robert Faurisson started attracting attention by making outrageous statements. He was to become one of the most publicized of the Holocaust revisionists.