The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (16 page)

I told him stories about my past and my own wobbly faith, which sprang from sixteen years of Catholic education—twelve with the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart and four with the Jesuits. I have always liked the idea that negotiating with God, either directly or through the Virgin Mary and the saints, just might trigger divine intervention. That’s how I tried to find God again in the fall of 1983. President Ronald Reagan had sent the marines
to help calm Lebanon’s civil war. They were drawn into the country’s partisan morass and came to be seen as participants rather than peacekeepers. I was a roving international correspondent for
Newsweek
. The Beirut bureau needed reinforcements.

The fighting was so intense that the Beirut airport was closed. The only way to get into the country was to sneak in: relatively safely by ferry across the Mediterranean from Cyprus or dangerously by car overland from Israel.

I am subject to motion sickness. Not just ordinary motion sickness but the debilitating kind that keeps me off every ride at an amusement park. Traveling on a slow-moving aircraft carrier requires massive doses of Dramamine. Swinging on a swing? Torture. An all-day ferry ride over the choppy Mediterranean? Never.

I flew into Tel Aviv, hired an Israeli driver, crossed the border into Lebanon with an American passport and no visa, hired an Arab driver, and headed north. Somewhere outside of Sidon, on the road to Beirut, the shelling started. I had no idea what the target was, or if there was a target. But shells were landing on both sides of a desolate road, so close that the smell of explosives filled our lungs. The driver wanted to turn back. I refused.

This was long before cell phones. I had no way to communicate with the outside world. I mentally took stock of the situation:
I work for a weekly news organization and no one is waiting to hear from me. I’m going to die with this panicked driver; vultures will attack my corpse before anyone knows I’m dead.

At that moment I thought of Saul on the road to Damascus. And I made a pact with the Almighty. “God,” I said, “If you get me out of this, I’ll believe!” (If truth be told, I said, “I’ll try hard to believe.”)

A few hours later I was in Beirut, in a comfortable room in the Commodore Hotel, where foreign journalists stayed. Shortly after I left, a few weeks later, suicide bombers blew up separate buildings housing American and French military forces, leaving 299 people dead. I had been at the American barracks just days before. Maybe God
was
looking out for me.

I told Guy that after this act of terrorism, I was trapped. I had promised God I would believe. I was superstitious and Sicilian enough to know that I had to keep my promise. Guy knew that even though I wasn’t Jewish, I was a worthy interlocutor.

Guy and I built a relationship of trust strong enough that one day he lent me a necklace for a black-tie event. I was planning to wear my black-tie-event uniform: a red silk Dior-style dress. It needed a necklace. Guy had the perfect one in his window, a gold-plated choker from the 1950s, delicately worked and flat against the skin. It was priced at 280 euros.

I told him I couldn’t justify spending that kind of money on a bauble. A fancy tasting meal for two in a Michelin-starred restaurant? Maybe. A piece of costume jewelry? Never.

“So wear it for the evening!” he said.

I was tempted to make a joke about Guy de Maupassant and his twisted tale “The Necklace,” but I knew Guy Lellouche was superstitious. I took the necklace and kept quiet.

I returned the next day with the necklace and a box of chocolates.

Then I asked if he had ever read “The Necklace.”

“Of course,” he said. “Everyone knows that story.”

It is a dark tale about a woman of little means who borrows a diamond necklace from a friend to wear to a fancy event. When she loses it, she borrows money and buys a replacement without
telling her friend what happened. She and her husband spend years working to pay off the new necklace. At the end of the story, the woman runs into her friend, and she learns that the necklace was fake. All the hard work and sacrifice were for naught.

I told Guy that in the story, the woman had lived on the rue des Martyrs. She really did. “She could have been our neighbor!” Guy said. He laughed and laughed.

One year I invited myself to his apartment to break the fast of Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish day of the year. Many Jews follow the rituals of the high holidays even if they don’t keep kosher, observe Shabbat, or consider themselves “religious.” They fast without food or drink for a full day, beginning at sundown the evening before; on the Day of Atonement, they go to synagogue to pray.

The eighteen-year-old Jewish daughter of a friend was staying with us during the Jewish holidays. She wanted to have a rich cultural experience in Paris. I signed her up for an English-language Yom Kippur service. But what to do about breaking the fast? Andy was out of town. The pressure was on.

Guy! I came right out and asked if we could join him. I knew he wouldn’t say no. To turn away a practicing Jew on the highest of holy days would have been worse than rude.

Guy’s apartment is on the ground floor in what was once a shop that sold motor oil. It is a modest space: a studio with a kitchen in the back; a narrow staircase leads to a sleeping loft. The apartment’s high ceilings provide plenty of wall space for him to hang dozens of paintings from his inventory, one above another.

He was proud that he had prepared the meal himself. First came a special drink made with lemon and honey; then pistachio, almond, and pine nut cake with quince jelly; then an egg-and-ground-chicken terrine.

Guy told us stories about Tunis, where people go from house to house to break the fast with family and friends. He said fasting made his legs ache, that the set of plates for the terrine dated from the late eighteenth century, that important French personalities had reserved places in his synagogue. He said that according to legend, the El Ghriba synagogue in Djerba was built on the site where a modest, pious, and beautiful young Jewish woman lived alone in a wooden cabin. One night her cabin was devoured by fire. She died in the blaze, but her body miraculously did not burn, and she was proclaimed a saint. Guy said she performed miracles. Her specialty was to make barren women pregnant.

A Jewish saint—who knew?

THEN ONE DAY GUY
was gone. A handwritten sign on the door announced that his shop was closed indefinitely. There was a number to call, but I didn’t recognize it and didn’t call. I didn’t want to hear bad news.

Slowly news seeped into the neighborhood that Guy had suffered some sort of attack and collapsed. There was no word on whether he would recover. I summoned the courage to call the number on the door and was patched in to his cell phone. His voice was slow and quiet. He had injured his back. He was in constant pain and would need surgery.

Months later he returned, twenty pounds lighter and what
seemed like ten years older. He had abandoned his air of casual elegance for the comfort of a velour jogging suit. But Guy being Guy, luck kicked in. He put on weight and began buying and selling again. He looked better than ever. One day he announced, “No operation! Four doctors say yes, and two say no. I’m going with the two who say no.”

His biggest problem was where to celebrate Passover. While he was in the hospital, his apartment had flooded. The insurance companies were still wrangling over who should take responsibility for the repairs.

“You’ll come to us,” I said.

We never seem to have enough people to fill our table, and certainly not enough who are familiar with the Passover story, the Seder plate, the yarmulkes, the table settings, and the Hebrew songs. Andy was pleased. He always leads the reading of the Passover story, the prayers, and the songs, navigating between English-Hebrew and French-Hebrew Haggadoth, depending on the linguistic talents and limitations of our guests. I take care of the food.

Guy came with his daughter, his granddaughter, and his special Tunisian Seder dish: beef simmered for fifteen hours with beans, eggs (still in their shells!), and Tunisian spices. The long, slow cooking turns the whites of the eggs a purplish brown. It was so special that Guy insisted it had to be served as a separate course—after the gefilte fish, matzo ball soup, and osso buco (my touch) and before the flourless chocolate cake. Jean-Claude Ribaut, one of France’s most important food critics and another of our guests that night, proclaimed the dish “Excellent!”

“You are like my little sister,” Guy told me on the way out.

That intimate designation came with responsibilities. One day Guy said he had a favor to ask. His daughter had never married.

“Could you find her a husband?” he asked. “He doesn’t even have to be Jewish.”

THE MURDERED SCHOOLGIRLS

. . .

To our martyrs, victims of Nazi barbarism who died for France. Tortured, deported, gassed, killed on the way or during bombings.
To forget would be to betray.

—M
EMORIAL PLAQUE
AT THE
E
DGAR
Q
UINET SCHOOL
ON THE RUE DES
M
ARTYRS

W
HEN TERRORISTS STRUCK PARIS IN JANUARY 2015,
leaving seventeen victims and three jihadist gunmen dead, the neighborhood mourned. Merchants up and down the rue des Martyrs taped black-and-white signs with the words “
Je suis Charlie
”—“I am Charlie”—to their windows; it had become the universal slogan of solidarity with the satirical newspaper
Charlie Hebdo,
the terrorists’ first target. Police armed with machine guns were stationed in front of a five-story Haussmannian structure on the rue des Martyrs, the residence of Patrick Pelloux, an emergency room doctor and part-time
Charlie Hebdo
columnist
who survived the attack. Residents welcomed the officers’ presence; even the preschoolers who were required to open their backpacks for inspection made small talk with them.

Among those killed were four Jews who had been taken hostage by one of the gunmen in the second target, a kosher supermarket on the fringe of Paris. That Friday evening, the Grand Synagogue of Paris, a few blocks from the rue des Martyrs, canceled its Shabbat services, the first time it had done so since World War II. The synagogue, the largest in Paris, had long been under police protection. Now more police officers armed with machine guns arrived as reinforcements, and new metal barriers were erected.

Before the attack against the supermarket, many of France’s Jews were already becoming uneasy about their place in the country. In Paris in 2014, anti-Semitism returned with new ferocity. Jewish groups recorded double the number of verbal and physical acts against Jews that year than the year before. In mid-July 2014 at the place de la République and in immigrant neighborhoods of Paris’s suburbs, for example, protesters shouted three ugly, evil words:
“Mort aux juifs!”
“Death to Jews!” A week later in Sarcelles, one of the Paris suburbs, youths protesting Israel’s military attacks in Gaza destroyed a Jewish-owned pharmacy. They showed no fear, only hatred.

France doesn’t know how many Jews (or how many Muslims) live within its borders. The country’s reverence for
laïcité
, which more or less translates to “secularism,” means that questions about race, religion, and ethnicity are not asked in the national census. The best estimate, according to American Jewish organizations, is that France has close to five hundred thousand Jews. Only Israel and the United States have larger Jewish populations.
More than four million and up to six million Muslims live in France out of a total population of sixty-six million. France’s history of anti-Semitism and its collaboration with the Nazis during World War II still cast shadows over the country’s political landscape. Charges of anti-Semitism cut deep.

French prime minister Manuel Valls struggled to give this anti-Jewish phenomenon a name. He called it a new “normalized” anti-Semitism that “blends the Palestinian cause, jihadism, the detestation of Israel, and the hatred of France and its values.” After the 2015 attack, he sought to assure the country’s Jews that they belonged. “Without the Jews of France,” he told the National Assembly, “France would no longer be France.”