A Song in the Night (8 page)

To speed the process of sorting, schools measured, graded, recorded, and finally published results for every student by class, subject, and age group. Class rankings were announced publicly after every test, and in every subject every six weeks. Grades were based on a scale of 1 to 20. Class participation and deportment counted for a great deal. Teachers enforced discipline
by handing out extra zeros, which arbitrarily lowered one’s score and rank for the month.

The system reeked of bias and whim. “Do you want to know what kind of grades you can expect from me?” one teacher asked us early in the year. “Here is my scale. Twenty is reserved for Almighty God. Nineteen is for the original author of the passage, such as Racine or Corneille. Eighteen is for the greatest scholar in the world. Seventeen would be for me. Your scores will all fall underneath—in most cases very far underneath.” Under these circumstances a student was considered a genius of the first order if she or he received a 15. Most students felt thrilled to pocket a 12.

Like every Western society in the late 1960s, France seethed with turmoil. There were so many strikes and demonstrations by workers and students that the French government deployed a specially trained and brutal group of riot police, known as the Companies Républicaines de Sécurité, or CRS, virtually every week. The CRS wore black helmets, tall boots, and dark blue uniforms specifically designed for street battle; they carried truncheons and plastic shields. I routinely discovered on my way to school that CRS trucks had cordoned off some section of Paris. One morning my municipal bus became stuck in the middle of a fierce demonstration; I watched as demonstrators and CRS officers flailed away at each other on the street corners. At one point two CRS officers grabbed a young female demonstrator. One of the men held her arms behind her back while the other deliberately stomped sideways on her ankle, breaking it. They then dropped her on the ground and fled.

There were also many good sides of French society. Like all the other countries in Europe, France had emerged from World War II with a deep commitment to provide health care to every citizen in the country. Unlike the United States, with its haphazard and unjust system of free-market insurance, France believed that everyone deserved health care as a right and created an interlocking system of national and private delivery and payment systems. To our surprise, my parents discovered that we were eligible for French health insurance, even though we were only residents, not citizens. Apparently the government considered it unthinkable that a child with a severe illness such as mine would not be treated on French soil simply because he or she had the wrong passport. In part because of this government policy, which gave me unlimited access to key blood products whenever I needed them, I experienced greater and greater freedom from bleeding at the same time that I was going through puberty and seeking more independence. Though I still had terrible problems from time to time, I was eventually able to stabilize my condition enough to travel on the subway at will and explore distant parts of the city for many hours on end.

I also wanted to bring greater freedom to my classmates at school. I felt that the students lacked a voice and a venue in which to discuss the changes they wanted to see. The solution, I decided, was obvious: a school newspaper! When I proposed the concept to my friends, they all thought it excellent—and completely hopeless. Students expressing their own ideas?
Impossible
.

I made an appointment with the formidable head of the school, known as Mme. la Directrice, and appeared at the appointed hour wearing a tie and carrying a pile of carefully prepared notes. She was a tiny woman who dressed entirely in black and whose silver hair was pulled back in a bun that suggested a helmet. She listened to me with a furrowed brow; I could not tell whether I was making progress or digging myself into deep trouble. Finally, at the end, she paused for a long time and then said she would consider it. The next day she called me back in, and to my surprise, she said that she would approve it as long as she could review the document before it was printed.

The whole project quickly became an example of the adage “Be careful what you wish for.” A handful of overworked students had to solicit, write, edit, illustrate, type, and mimeograph the articles. After six weeks of intense labor, my classmates and I brought out the first—and, it turned out, the only—newspaper in the ninety-year history of the school.

We also took on the rampant problem of cheating. Because of the emphasis on memorization and grades, students tried every trick they could think of to give themselves an advantage. They wrote notes on their hands or on tiny pieces of paper that they concealed in their jewelry. They sat next to each other and copied each other’s exam papers. In many cases the teachers simply turned a blind eye; students often brought their textbooks into the testing room and secretly balanced them on their knees just below the level of the tabletop, so they could copy directly from them.

When I brought it up, everyone agreed that this was a
serious problem. I quickly realized that their concern was not enough. The students did not want to stop doing it, and the teachers did not want to admit that it was taking place, and so nothing happened. My efforts at organizing foundered. From this I learned a lesson about the special challenge of trying to create change when there is no constituency to support it.

The longer I was in France, the more I came to admire the United States. Part of it was the longing that comes over every expatriate to return to his or her country. At one point I experienced such longing for America that it influenced a major purchase. I had accumulated a small amount of money from odd jobs and allowance, and I was thinking about purchasing a guitar or a tape recorder. I went to a French music store and noticed a long row of banjos lining the top of the wall.

“What are those?” I asked.

“That one is a six-string banjo, tuned like a guitar,” said the young man. “And that one is a four-string jazz banjo.”

“And what’s that one?” I asked, pointing to the last one in the row.

“That’s the five-string
American
banjo,” he said.

I bought it on the spot.

“How can I learn to play it?” I asked, a little late.

He shrugged his shoulders. Then his eyes lit up and he dashed into a room behind the counter. I heard him tossing papers and books around. A few minutes later he emerged with a mimeographed copy in English of
How to Play the 5-String
Banjo
, by Pete Seeger. I went home happy and locked myself in my room for the better part of a week. I have been playing ever since.

Thus, looking at American culture from a distance, I came to see its good qualities. Though my family and I opposed the Vietnam War, I grew tired of listening to constant criticism of American policy. I became particularly incensed when people thought that the United States was the only country in the world that had a problem with racism. Once, over lunch, an aging woman whose only job was to sit at the top of the stairs and shout at children to slow down came over to speak to me. She launched into a lengthy attack on America’s appalling treatment of its minority citizens. I listened for a while.

“But don’t you believe, Madame, that France has its own problems with race?” I said. “I see Africans sweeping the streets and Algerians working construction, but in no other jobs. Perhaps the French people have their own difficulties with race?”

“Oh no,
pas du tout
!” she exclaimed. “We are not racists in any way! We even let them be policemen!”

Living abroad also brought us into contact with an endless string of fascinating people from all over the world who filed through our home and told their stories. One of the universal themes was the escape from tyranny. Sitting in Europe, barely two decades away from World War II and only a few hundred
miles from the military power of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, we became keenly aware of the human dimension of the struggle for human rights.

Our family was deeply involved in Russian history and contemporary Russian life. My father set to work on what turned into a ten-year project of writing a biography of Peter the Great. My mother wrote a series of essays and translations of Russian poetry, printed in both Russian and English. It was published in 1972 as
The Living Mirror: Five Young Poets from Leningrad
. During her many trips to Russia my mother had also fallen in with a circle of painters, dancers, and other artists. She began to collect their stories and, in modest amounts, their works, smuggling them out among her clothes.

We heard at first hand about Soviet brutality against those the state considered intellectually or politically dangerous. When the Soviet secret police suspected that one of our friends and one of Russia’s great character dancers, Sasha Mintz, wanted to leave Russia, they sent thugs who beat him and broke his collarbone. We were horrified, for we knew that such an attack could easily have ended his career. My parents also fought for years on behalf of the ballet couple Valery and Galina Panov. Though Valery was one of the greatest dancers in all Russia, he was largely unknown in the West, because he had been allowed to perform only a single time in New York. When he applied to emigrate to Israel, he was fired and exiled to a distant rural town; his wife, Galina, also a dancer, was pressured to divorce him; and he lived with the daily fear of violence and assassination. After many years he was released, but only after my parents and hundreds of other supporters in
the West held protests and pressured the Soviet Union to stop its destruction of this exceptional artist.

That single success did little to alter our disgust with Soviet human rights violations and hypocrisy. I learned through these experiences that the crime of brutalizing citizens required no particular political label. It did not matter whether the government was identified as left-wing or right-wing; dictators were dictators. They needed to be opposed no matter what the political excuses for their behavior. Stories of persecution and brutality arrived almost daily in the mail or over the ancient black telephone that sat on the oval table near the window overlooking the courtyard with its peaceful trees.