Happy New Year, 2019

Wishing everyone a great New Year! I'm still blogging food, books, travel, and random thoughts at

maefood.blogspot.com

In the past year, to update the travel theme -- we took three big trips: to Israel in spring, to the Pacific Northwest in autumn, and to Paris for Thanksgiving week. A brief summary in photos:

Kiryat Ono, Israel. Passover Seder at Janet's house.

British Columbia, Desolation Sound.

Paris. Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens.

And here at home in Ann Arbor, I'm taking photos of street art and murals, like this one on Liberty Street.

"Dora Bruder" by Patrick Modiano

View of the accommodation block at Drancy with French gendarme on guard
-- from Wikipedia article "Drancy internment camp."

Memory and forgetting are the topics of the book Dora Bruder by recent Nobelist Patrick Modiano. Dora Bruder, born in 1926, ran away and disappeared from her Catholic school, disappeared from her family, disappeared finally into transit camps in France and then into the Holocaust, eventually disappeared from the memories of possible schoolmates, of possible teachers, of anyone possible at all. 

Years after the war ended, Modiano had seen a Paris newspaper ad from 1941 asking for news of Dora. She had run away from her school; he became curious and over a period of years, he tried to find out about her life as a Jewish child, a French citizen, daughter of an Austrian-Jewish man and a Hungarian-Jewish woman living legally in a hotel on a particular street in Paris. He searched for information about her life as a runaway or about her life as a child perhaps being hidden by nuns in a Catholic school. He searched for people that had known her, but finds only people whose experiences were simultaneous and parallel.

As Modiano searched, we learn from the book, he visited the streets where she lived and walked, streets already familiar to him because he'd lived his life in the same neighborhood. Exact locations in Paris are so important that one needs Paris street maps. Two small maps, along with a few photos of Dora, illustrate the book.

Modiano, who was born in 1945, writes of his own life -- in safer times -- as he writes about his effort to reconstruct the life of Dora Bruder. She's gone, he finds: disappeared. Of course the idea is that a vast community of lives were not only lost, but their memories completely erased; vast numbers of people disappeared as did this one in particular. 

In writing, Modiano manages to make this point with discretion and subtlety, without being melodramatic. He matter-of-factly describes his search for information about Dora and where she had run to, and where she ended up. He forces the reader to ask the hard questions.

Here's an example. Modiano describes a film, a trivial film, titled Premier rendez-vous that showed in Paris in 1941: "a harmless comedy." He had seen the film decades later. Had Dora seen it? He wondered. The film seemed to have a "peculiar luminosity... Every image seemed veiled in an arctic whiteness that accentuated the contrasts and sometimes obliterated them. The lighting was at once too bright and too dim, either stifling the voices or making their timbre louder, more disturbing." (p. 65)

Modiano speculated:

"Suddenly, I realized that this film was impregnated with the gaze of moviegoers from the time of the Occupation -- people from all walks of life, most of whom would not have survived the war.They had been taken out of themselves after having seen this film one Saturday night, their night out. While it lasted, you forgot the war and the menacing world outside. Huddled together in the dark of a cinema, you were caught up in the flow of images on the screen, and nothing more could happen to you. And by some kind of chemical process, this combined gaze had materially altered the actual film, the lighting, the voices of the actors. This is what I had sensed, thinking of Dora Bruder and faced with the ostemsibly trival images of Premier rendez-vous." (p. 66)

Obviously reading this book is an extremely painful experience, and obviously it must have been even more painful to write. With the world today full of refugees, full of death as they try to find anywhere that they can live, it's even more painful than when Modiano wrote it around 20 years ago. Painful. Impossible.

The last paragraph of the book:

"I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when seh escaped for the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time -- everything that defiles and destroys you -- have been able to take away from her." (p. 119)

Paris Burning

Riots in Sarcelles, a suburb of Paris, July 20, 2014. Photo from Haaretz.

Paris "inside the walls" is a peaceful and beautiful place, full of incredible historic buildings, restaurants of notable quality, museums and churches, boutiques and open-air markets, and picturesque street scenes. Central Paris is home to around 2 million people. The other 9 million or so Parisians live outside this magnificent and museum-like marvel. The Paris suburbs include many beautiful, tree-lined neighborhoods and delightful parks such as the Bois de Boulogne. But there's another part of Paris that no tourist need ever experience: the impoverished suburbs where immigrant communities live in a different world.

Many of the immigrants are Muslims, who are alienated from  the French mainstream. They suffer from high unemployment and predictable social problems. For the last two weekends, these Muslims and others have demonstrated against Israel -- and against all Jews -- engaging in antisemitic violence of a type that's all too recognizable. Demonstrators have attacked a synagogue while chanting "Jews to the ovens," looted Jewish-owned shops, and beaten individuals who were walking on the streets.

After violence the previous weekend, demonstrations were prohibited for July 20, but took place anyway. An editorial in the New York Times writes of the demonstrations: "While many protesters stayed home, some defied the ban to assert what they said was their right to demonstrate peacefully. Others came bent on violence, including some spewing virulent anti-Semitic views. In the largely immigrant neighborhood of Barbès on Saturday and on Sunday in the northern suburb of Sarcelles, demonstrations degenerated into street battles between protesters hurling stones and police firing tear gas. In Barbès, an Israeli flag was burned. In Sarcelles, a kosher market was looted, cars set on fire, shop windows smashed, a funeral home attacked."

From Haaretz:

"It is unacceptable to target synagogues or shops simply because they are managed by Jews," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters during a visit to Sarcelles, which is also home to large non-Jewish immigrant populations. 

"Nothing can justify anti-Semitism, noting can justify that kind of violence. This will be fought and sanctioned," he said. 

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Manuel Valls has denounced a "new form of anti-Semitism" on the Internet that he said was spreading among youth in working-class neighborhoods. Speaking as France honored some 13,000 Jews rounded up 72 years ago, most kept in a cycling stadium before being sent to Auschwitz, Valls said, "France will not allow provocations to feed ... conflicts between communities."

I've been participating in the blog event "Paris in July." It's nostalgic, artistic, literary, and beautiful -- all about Paris inside the walls, where all is peaceful. A paradise on earth. I'm posting this as a kind of balancing view of the not-so-paradisical Paris.

Paris in my Mind's Eye

When I think of Paris, vignettes from the past, from novels, and from films fill my mind's eye -- along with the standard images of boulevards, monuments, and metro rides. I think of the Musee Carnavalet, full of Paris history -- and recall one particular exhibit, the actual furnishings and noise-deadening wall-coverings of Proust's actual bedroom where he wrote. The museum has a long page devoted to this room. I'm thinking of it partly because Proust was a contemporary of Edouard de Pomiane, the cookbook author who is the subject of my current research project.

Musee Carnavalet: Proust's Bedroom

At the moment, I'm reading Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette a biography by Judith Thurman. Colette lived in Paris and was a nearly exact contemporary of my subject, Pomiane. They may have lived in the same city, but in two totally different worlds! The cover of her book, published 1920:

Another view of Paris: I recall scenes from Godard's film "Breathless," especially the scenes where Jean Seberg was selling the Herald-Tribune on the street. When I saw the film recently, it took me back to my first visit to Paris, a few years after the film was made.

From the New York Times: a scene from Breathless

And the film Pépé le Moko (1937) has memories of Paris, the title character's home, though the action takes place in Algiers. A certain style of film noir from the thirties was characteristic of the way Parisian film makers worked.

Last year, I had just come back from Paris before the blog event "Paris in July." It's been a year since the trip, but my mental images have not faded. Back then, I listed a number of films that featured Paris. They were: "Charade," "Hugo," Disney's "Hunchback of Notre Dame,""Last Tango in Paris," "Midnight in Paris," "Night on Earth," "Ratattouille," "Sous les toits de Paris" and "Zazie in the Metro."  Now I've thought of these two -- I suspect there are many more.